Railway Maintenance Must Become Smarter

One of the conclusions of Arjen Zoeteman, who will defend his thesis on 22 November at TU Delft, is that significant amounts of money could be saved on the maintenance of European railway systems, including the Netherlands. Through a carefully structured schedule and a detailed analysis of maintenance work, he was able to achieve a cost reduction of 10 percent for the Dutch railway system.


The operators of the rail networks, such as NS, are continuously increasing the demands on the administrators, such as Prorail (in the Netherlands). The type of maintenance work is therefore shifting from craftsmanship based on individual knowledge to an engineering discipline in which quantitative calculations play an important role. According to Zoeteman, most European railway administrators fall short in their analysis and scheduling of maintenance. This shows in, among other things, the lack of detailed information systems for the analysis of maintenance performance. Another aspect that Zoeteman states should be strongly developed is a ‘life-cycle’ way of thinking, in which long term cost-effectiveness is taken into account.

One of the underlying problems, according to Zoeteman, is the division of the maintenance work into separate disciplines and maintenance regions (the Netherlands, for example, has four regions). At the moment, budgets are generally granted based on requests that come from the ‘bottom up’, in other words, from the various disciplines and regions. Zoeteman thinks that a centrally managed process of quality guarantee, based on an overview of the total situation will deliver better results.

Zoeteman has tested his ideas for improvement in a number of practical situations. One of those was a study conducted at Prorail. The goal was to, for the first time, come up with a number of national guidelines for railway system renewal. The project resulted in a predicted saving of 10 percent in the costs of the renewal of the superstructure. Based on his research, Zoeteman is going to work with Prorail on a damage catalogue for large scale maintenance and renewal. Eventually this could be used in a so-called Decision Support System (DSS). A DSS is a computer system that assists administrators in making the best choices for a particular purpose, in this case the upkeep of the railway system.

Media Contact

Maarten van der Sanden alfa

More Information:

http://www.tudelft.nl

All latest news from the category: Transportation and Logistics

This field deals with all spatial and time-related activities involved in bridging the gap between goods and people, including their restructuring. This begins with the supplier and follows each stage of the operational value chain to product delivery and concludes with product disposal and recycling.

innovations-report provides informative reports and articles on such topics as traffic telematics, toll collection, traffic management systems, route planning, high-speed rail (Transrapid), traffic infrastructures, air safety, transport technologies, transport logistics, production logistics and mobility.

Back to home

Comments (0)

Write a comment

Newest articles

Lighting up the future

New multidisciplinary research from the University of St Andrews could lead to more efficient televisions, computer screens and lighting. Researchers at the Organic Semiconductor Centre in the School of Physics and…

Researchers crack sugarcane’s complex genetic code

Sweet success: Scientists created a highly accurate reference genome for one of the most important modern crops and found a rare example of how genes confer disease resistance in plants….

Evolution of the most powerful ocean current on Earth

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current plays an important part in global overturning circulation, the exchange of heat and CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere, and the stability of Antarctica’s ice sheets….

Partners & Sponsors