Process-Oriented Framework for Reliability and Life-Cycle Engineering of Railway Systems

Modern standards and requirements for ensuring the reliability and safety of transport infrastructure are aimed at shifting from routine maintenance to preventive maintenance, focused on predicting technical conditions and lifecycle management. Modern engineering approaches are based on the logic of state assessment and ensuring structural strength and dimensional stability. Therefore, they focus on recording defects or deviations from acceptable values without revealing the failure mechanism, which limits the ability to identify degradation processes and predict failures. The purpose of this article is to develop a formal conceptual framework for operationalizing process-oriented reliability analysis. Within this methodological framework, state is viewed as a snapshot of a dynamic process, while process stability is defined as the ability of a system to maintain its key behavioral characteristics under changing operating conditions and the geometric and physical–mechanical properties of system elements. The proposed framework expands on classical state-based diagnostics by introducing process invariants as prognostic indicators. The transition to trajectory-based behavior analysis allows monitoring systems to evolve into lifecycle management tools.