Multi-objective model for optimizing railway infrastructure asset renewal

Trabalho inspirado num problema real da empresa Infraestruturas de Portugal, EP.A multi-objective model for managing railway infrastructure asset renewal is presented. The model aims to optimize three objectives, while respecting operational constraints: levelling investment throughout multiple years, minimizing total cost and minimizing work start postponements. Its output is an optimized intervention schedule. The model is based on a case study from a Portuguese infrastructure management company, which specified the objectives and constraints, and reflects management practice on railway infrastructure. The results show that investment levelling greatly influences the other objectives and that total cost fluctuations may range from insignificant to important, depending on the condition of the infrastructure. The results structure is argued to be general and suggests a practical methodology for analysing trade-offs and selecting a solution for implementation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Recurrence and transience for suspension flows

We study the thermodynamic formalism for suspension flows over countable Markov shifts with roof functions not necessarily bounded away from zero. We establish conditions to ensure the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium measures for regular potentials. We define the notions of recurrence and transience of a potential in this setting. We define the "renewal flow", which is a symbolic model for a class of flows with diverse recurrence features. We study the corresponding thermodynamic formalism, establishing conditions for the existence of equilibrium measures and phase transitions. Applications are given to suspension flows defined over interval maps having parabolic fixed points.Comment: In this version of the paper some typos have been corrected and some references updated. Note that the former title of this paper was "Parabolic suspension flows

On the Statistical Modeling and Analysis of Repairable Systems

We review basic modeling approaches for failure and maintenance data from repairable systems. In particular we consider imperfect repair models, defined in terms of virtual age processes, and the trend-renewal process which extends the nonhomogeneous Poisson process and the renewal process. In the case where several systems of the same kind are observed, we show how observed covariates and unobserved heterogeneity can be included in the models. We also consider various approaches to trend testing. Modern reliability data bases usually contain information on the type of failure, the type of maintenance and so forth in addition to the failure times themselves. Basing our work on recent literature we present a framework where the observed events are modeled as marked point processes, with marks labeling the types of events. Throughout the paper the emphasis is more on modeling than on statistical inference.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000448 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Stability Analysis of GI/G/c/K Retrial Queue with Constant Retrial Rate

We consider a GI/G/c/K-type retrial queueing system with constant retrial rate. The system consists of a primary queue and an orbit queue. The primary queue has $c$ identical servers and can accommodate the maximal number of $K$ jobs. If a newly arriving job finds the full primary queue, it joins the orbit. The original primary jobs arrive to the system according to a renewal process. The jobs have general i.i.d. service times. A job in front of the orbit queue retries to enter the primary queue after an exponentially distributed time independent of the orbit queue length. Telephone exchange systems, Medium Access Protocols and short TCP transfers are just some applications of the proposed queueing system. For this system we establish minimal sufficient stability conditions. Our model is very general. In addition, to the known particular cases (e.g., M/G/1/1 or M/M/c/c systems), the proposed model covers as particular cases the deterministic service model and the Erlang model with constant retrial rate. The latter particular cases have not been considered in the past. The obtained stability conditions have clear probabilistic interpretation

Non trivial limit distributions for transient renewal chains

In this work we study the asymptotic of renewal sequences associated with certain transient renewal Markov chains and enquire about the existence of limit laws in this set up