Opportunistic inspection planning for Railway eMaintenance

Abstract: Railway infrastructure is a complex system that comprises of several subsystems which interacts in hierarchical, multi-distributive and multi-user environment. It is a difficult task to perform inspections for all the assets at an instant because the train management system decides when to conduct different types of inspection techniques on several assets in a particular track section. There are two main wastes of resources for inspection planning occurred in maintenance; under usage due to inaccurate prediction of failure and over usage because the necessary information already has been acquired from other sources. These irregularities lead to wastage of resources, for instance, human, machine and time that has tremendous implications on cost, availability and manpower. This paper proposes a methodology by using intelligent functional test outcome to assess the performability of an asset and integrating the data to the eMaintenance cloud platform of Swedish railway infrastructure. By implementing this methodology, we can achieve better planning of resources for optimal performance of assets. A case study is performed on Switches and Crossings of Swedish railway infrastructure for the applicability of the proposed methodology.