System Petri net modelling for railway infrastructure asset management

Railway infrastructure managers face the challenge of attaining a high level of performance and safety while meeting strict financial targets. To assist with decision making, modelling is needed to predict and evaluate the outcomes of different maintenance strategies and investment options, to understand which will deliver the optimum result. Railway networks are complex systems containing a diverse range of assets. To date most modelling approaches have focused on a single asset class, treating it as a silo. Although beneficial, these models are unable to capture the inherent interactions between components and, although greatly improving the decision-making process, may still not lead to optimum outcomes. The aim of this paper is to present a whole system framework that can model a range of asset classes simultaneously, enabling the interactions between asset classes to be considered, thus allowing practitioners to make decisions based on whole system and whole life cost. The feasibility and benefits of such a model are explored through application to a case study on the UK railway network. A sensitivity analysis was then conducted on the maintenance and renewal budget to explore the impact on life cycle cost.