Toward user-oriented asset management for urban railway systems

Managing public infrastructure is becoming more complex due to aging assets, increasing demand, and budget limitations. Besides these challenges, best practices recommend putting stakeholders (specifically end-users) in the center of asset management planning for public assets incorporating provided services in the decision-making process to achieve sustainable cities goals. This study improves the classical asset-based approach and proposed a user-oriented platform to maintain urban railway systems. The model is applied to the Toronto regional railway network (Go Transit) in Canada and the Greater Montreal regional railway network (Exo). Results indicate that a proactive approach significantly can save money and bring higher value and performance for the agency. The user-oriented platform was able to push budget allocation toward enhancing provided and potential services for users. The same idea can be extended to other transit systems as well as other infrastructure