Maintenance Strategy for a Railway Infrastructure: in a Regulated Environment

The operation and maintenance of railway infrastructure is complex, strictly regulated by government legislation, and must be working in close cooperation with all the stakeholders including customers involved, in order to avoid sub optimization. The business configuration of the Railway system makes it very difficult to optimize the entire railway operation. The issues are made more complex by mixed traffic with varying speed and axle load. Thus, developing an integrated and holistic operational and maintenance policy is complex considering multiple stakeholders with varying and conflicting interest and business demand. A conceptual framework has been developed that describes all the factors that the infrastructure manager has to consider. The framework also describes whether the factors are strategic, tactical or operative, and how they are related to each other and how it will affect the railway system, if one of them is changed. Problems associated for managing infrastructure maintenance strategy, some of the factors like, partnering and outsourcing, benchmarking and risk management are also studied, analyzed and discussed.