IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/risrel/v226y2012i3p274-282.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Monte Carlo simulation of railway track geometry deterioration and restoration

Author

Listed:
  • L M Quiroga
  • E Schnieder

Abstract

Travelling safely and comfortably on high-speed railway lines requires excellent conditions of the whole railway infrastructure in general and of the railway track geometry in particular. The maintenance process required to achieve such excellent conditions is complex and expensive, demanding a large amount of both human and technical resources. In this framework, choosing the right maintenance strategy becomes a critical issue. A reliable simulation of the railway geometry ageing process would offer a great advantage for the optimization of planning and scheduling of maintenance activities. A fundamental requirement for such simulation is a statistical model describing the behaviour of the railway track geometry deterioration as well as the effects of maintenance activities. The French railway operator SNCF has been periodically measuring the geometrical characteristics of its high-speed network since its commissioning (i.e. for more than 20 years now). These records are an excellent data source to achieve a sound statistical description of the process. In this paper a new system identification method to obtain such simulations is presented. The proposed method uses a grey-box model: a model structure and its constraints are specified basing on previous knowledge of the process to be identified, and then the set of parameter values which best fits the signal measurements is searched. As previous knowledge indicates that the process is non-linear, parameter values are searched by means of the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm, an iterative technique that finds a local minimum of a function that is expressed as the sum of squares of non-linear functions. Furthermore, the presented model is extended in order to analyse the effect of the variation of factors influencing the ageing process (e.g. operational speed). Finally, the method is applied and validated with real data of a French high-speed TGV line.

Suggested Citation

  • L M Quiroga & E Schnieder, 2012. "Monte Carlo simulation of railway track geometry deterioration and restoration," Journal of Risk and Reliability, , vol. 226(3), pages 274-282, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:risrel:v:226:y:2012:i:3:p:274-282
    DOI: 10.1177/1748006X11418422
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1748006X11418422
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/1748006X11418422?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Chiachío, Juan & Chiachío, Manuel & Prescott, Darren & Andrews, John, 2019. "A knowledge-based prognostics framework for railway track geometry degradation," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 181(C), pages 127-141.
    2. Andrade, A.R. & Teixeira, P.F., 2015. "Statistical modelling of railway track geometry degradation using Hierarchical Bayesian models," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 169-183.
    3. Andrews, John & Prescott, Darren & De Rozières, Florian, 2014. "A stochastic model for railway track asset management," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 76-84.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:risrel:v:226:y:2012:i:3:p:274-282. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.