Maintenance Control

Regardless the railway infrastructure manager organization and the modalities maintenance is carried out (in house vs contracted), it is not only important to be in full control over the condition and deterioration of the most critical assets but also in constant control over the maintenance activities.

Great differences in the resulting maintenance plan can occur as the consequence of different decision-rules being applied and different thresholds defined.

The question poses itself: “How do you define such decision rules and decide which ones to use, and with which thresholds?” The answer to this question is neither simple nor straightforward. Namely, whereas some of the condition or performance parameters have clear and well-known limit values, namely safety thresholds, often prescribed by some responsible bodies’ standards like UIC (International Union of Railways), most of the others fall in the domain of the M&R policy adopted and practiced by a certain Railway, namely maintenance thresholds.

Therefore, with the exception of those that are made mandatory by bodies like UIC, the rest must be defined by the respective Railways. The only way to do that on the other hand is for every Railway to perform detailed investigation of those rules, i.e. by simulating different strategies and policies, often at a very high level, and then consequently work their way out towards lower-level strategies, formalized into decision-rules, as those presented above, to be used systematically and consistently throughout the Railway organization.

Obviously, normally this would be quite a complex and lengthy task, so RAMSYS is equipped with full set of functionalities to allow its Users to perform these sophisticated simulations in an easy and user-friendly manner, bringing tremendous power to the Railway’s Policy-making.