Development of a whole life cycle cost model for electrification options on the UK rail system

Projects to deliver Overhead Line Equipment (OLE) electrification on the UK rail infrastructure system presents technical challenges which the rail industry in Britain have not traditionally had to consider. Whole Life Cycle assessment provides decision makers with cost estimates for the installation phase and over the entire service life of the system, including disposal. The OLE projects face a particular problem when analysing the best option for overbridges. Much of the rail infrastructure has not traditionally had to consider overhead clearances and therefore many of the bridges are only a little taller than the rolling stock. In addition to the difficulties in assessing the Life-Cycle costs of assets that have historically been used in very limited scales, the Whole Life Cycle assessment must consider the various engineering options that are available for projects. The three competing options (bridge rebuild, track lowering, reduced clearance) are all going to have very different capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating expenditure (OPEX) costs. This work presents a model created to predict these costs over the anticipated assessment period. The developed model predicts capital expenditures, maintenance and service disruption costs and links them to the three major assets options involved in OLE underbridges

Analysis of the “make or buy” decision process in a research and development sme

Start-up SMEs face various challenges and difficulties during their existence and due to their nature they often lack knowledge and resources to fully address these challenges. Unlike large companies which have access to various resources, those resources are a significant gap for SMEs and the business owners have to rely on their own limited knowledge. The “Make or buy” decision is a critical decision in an organisation. This decision can affect current and future costs, capability and competences in the company and by taking best practice approaches and measures towards the decision making, extensive costs can be potentially saved. In this study, literature best practices have been reviewed. In addition a small company has been studied and the current practices of the company have been compared to academic best practices. The result of the study will be used to improve the “Make or buy” decision process in the company

Uncertainty of net present value calculations and the impact on applying integrated maintenance approaches to the UK rail industry

The Public performance indicator (PPI) is an important Key Performance Indicator for Network Rail and monitored carefully by the organisation and their external stakeholders. Condition monitoring is of increasing interest within network rail as a suitable method for increasing asset reliability and improving the PPI metric. As condition monitoring methods are identified each will need assessment to establish the cost and benefit. Benefit can be measured in cost savings as poor PPI performance results in fines. Within many industries Net Present Value (NPV) calculations are used to determine how quickly investments will break-even. Cost-risk is a term that is used to describe the financial impact of an unexpected event (a risk). This paper outlines a more detailed approach to calculating NPV which considers the cost-risk effect of changes of the denial of service charging rate. NPV prediction is of importance when assessing when to deploy different fault detection strategies to maintenance issues, and therefore the cost-risk of the NPV calculation should be used to support asset management decisions

Towards a framework for predicting whole life-cycle cost for long-term digital preservation

Estimating the costs for the whole lifecycle of long-term digital preservation (LTDP) activities ena-bles decision makers to choose carefully what data to preserve, duration of preservation and type of preservation techniques best applied for their information. To address this need, a framework is de-veloped to generate a cost model that will estimate costs for long-term digital preservation activities using storage in the cloud and taking into consideration the impact of mitigating uncertainties, espe-cially obsolescence issues on future costs. This cost estimating framework is part of the European pro-ject entitled ‘Enabling kNowledge Sustainability Usability and Recovery for Economic value’ which aims to provide a total long-term digital preservation solution for companies and public sector organi-sations interested in keeping their digital information alive for the long-term within the healthcare, fi-nancial and the clinical trials business sectors

Cost drivers of integrated maintenance in high-value systems

High value systems are determined by a wide structure, where operations are considered to be one structural component. Nowadays “down-time” as a major impact in the operation costs of any system. To avoid or minimize “down-time” it is essential to match the appropriate maintenance to each failure. Therefore, it is relevant to determine the cost drivers of integrated maintenance in any system, in order to minimize the overall cost. It is common to use Value Driven Maintenance (VDM) to capture the cost drivers in maintenance. VDM is a methodology which relies in four distinct areas: Asset Utilization; Resource Allocation; Control Cost and Health and Safety and Environment. Within each category it is possible to allocate different cost drivers, building a framework for each system studied. The aim of this paper is to categorize the cost drivers of rail infrastructure networks, associating them with the maintenance preformed for each case. Furthermore, analysis of which part of the track falls under each VDM category as well as the general failure causes and effects will be included in the framework presented. Finally relating the maintenance type for each effect will provide the necessary inputs towards a cost model structure. The benefit of achieving a successful model will be the optimization of the cost in integrated maintenance of the rail infrastructure

Integration of cost-risk assessment of denial of service within an intelligent maintenance system

As organisations become richer in data the function of asset management will have to increasingly use intelligent systems to control condition monitoring systems and organise maintenance. In the future the UK rail industry is anticipating having to optimize capacity by running trains closer to each other. In this situation maintenance becomes extremely problematic as within such a high-performance network a relatively minor fault will impact more trains and passengers; such denial of service causes reputational damage for the industry and causes fines to be levied against the infrastructure owner, Network Rail. Intelligent systems used to control condition monitoring systems will need to optimize for several factors; optimization for minimizing denial of service will be one such factor. With schedules anticipated to be increasingly complicated detailed estimation methods will be extremely difficult to implement. Cost prediction of maintenance activities tend to be expert driven and require extensive details, making automation of such an activity difficult. Therefore a stochastic process will be needed to approach the problem of predicting the denial of service arising from any required maintenance. Good uncertainty modelling will help to increase the confidence of estimates. This paper seeks to detail the challenges that the UK Railway industry face with regards to cost modelling of maintenance activities and outline an example of a suitable cost model for quantifying cost uncertainty. The proposed uncertainty quantification is based on historical cost data and interpretation of its statistical distributions. These estimates are then integrated in a cost model to obtain accurate uncertainty measurements of outputs through Monte-Carlo simulation methods. An additional criteria of the model was that it be suitable for integration into an existing prototype integrated intelligent maintenance system. It is anticipated that applying an integrated maintenance management system will apply significant downward pressure on maintenance budgets and reduce denial of service. Accurate cost estimation is therefore of great importance if anticipated cost efficiencies are to be achieved. While the rail industry has been the focus of this work, other industries have been considered and it is anticipated that the approach will be applicable to many other organisations across several asset management intensive industrie

Improving the cost model development process using fuzzy logic

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Modelling long term digital preservation costs: a scientific data case study

In recent years there has been increasing UK Government pressure on publicly funded researchers to plan the preservation and ensure the accessibility of their data for the long term. A critical challenge in implementing a digital preservation strategy is the estimation of such a programme’s cost. This pa-per presents a case study based on the cost estimation of preserving scientific data produced in the ISIS facility based at The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory UK. The model for cost estimation for long term digital preservation is presented along with an outline of the development and validation activities undertaken as part of this project. The framework and methodology from this research provide an insight into the task of costing long term digital preservation processes, and can potentially be adapted to deliver benefits to other organisa-tions

Search for practical alternatives to organotin hydrides

A summary of the tin hydride method of generating radicals in organic synthesis is presented, followed by illustrative examples of other methods available for mediating radical reactions, with a particular emphasis on recent developments. This is followed by four chapters describing our efforts to introduce alternative methods for generating radicals. A range of l-alkylcyclohexa-2,5-diene-l-carboxylic acids have been prepared by Birch reduction-alkylation methodology and shown to generate the corresponding alkyl radical by thermal initiation with dibenzoyl peroxide. The 1-benzyl, cyclopentyl and t-butyl precursors (17,15, and 16 respectively), acted as sources of radicals which were trapped with cyclohexenone to give the corresponding 3-alkylcyclohexanone adducts in yields of 52%, 30% and 25% respectively. Addition products were also observed when acrylonitrile and vinyl benzoate were employed as the radical traps. 1-[2-(Cylohex-2-enyloxy)ethyl]cyclohexa-2,5-diene-l-carboxylic acid 32 and l-[2-(6,6- dimethylbicyclo[3.1. l]hept-2-en-2-ylmethoxy)ethyl]cyclohexa-2,5-diene- 1-carboxyhc acid 33 are new compounds which were prepared in four straightforward steps from cyclohexene and β-pinene respectively. The route leading to acid 32 involved the preparation of four new compounds and three new compounds were prepared during the synthesis of acid 33. When refluxed in benzene in the presence of dibenzoyl peroxide, carboxylic acid 32 generated a primary alkyl radical which cyclised to yield 7- oxabicyclo[4.3.0]-nonane in 55% yield. The tin-mediated cyclisation of 3-(2'- iodoethoxy)cyclohexene 36 yielded the same compound in 60% yield, in addition to 3- ethoxycyclohexene (12%). Similarly, carboxylic acid 33 generated a primary alkyl radical which cyclised to yield the new compound oxacyclopentane-3-spiro-2-6,6- dimethylbicyclo[3.1.1]heptane in 10% yield. The tin-mediated cyclisation of 6,6-dimethyl- 2-(2-iodoethoxymethyl)bicyclo[3.1.1]hept-2-ene 37 yielded the same spiro compound in 31% yield. EPR spectroscopic studies provided direct evidence for the formation of the cyclohexadienyl radicals from all of the carboxylic acids investigated. Carboxylic acids 15- 17 and l-[2-(ethenyloxy)benzyl]cyclohexa-2,5-diene-l-carboxylic acid 34 also generated alkyl radicals which were clearly observed by EPR spectroscopy. The carboxylic acid radical precursors would have yielded products in higher yields if the competitive loss of a hydroxyformyl radical did not occur. An account of our work directed towards the synthesis of l-phenylcyclohexa-2,5-diene-l- carboxylic acid 8 is given. Thus, 1,4-dihydrobiphenyl was deprotonated with BuLi, added to CO2 and the isomeric acid, 3-carboxylic acid-3,4-dihydrobiphenyl was removed by reacting with maleic anhydride to give the Diels-Alder adduct. 2-(Cyclohex-2-enyloxy)ethyl l-phenylcyclohexa-2,5-diene-l-carboxylate 24 was treated with dibenzoyl peroxide to afford 7-oxabicyclo[4.3.0]nonane in yields of 32-36%. A variety of N-carboalkoxy-l,2-dihydropyridines have been prepared from the reaction of pyridine and the appropriate chloroforniate in the presence of NaBH₄. EPR studies have shown that these esters produce aza-cyclohexadienyl radicals on photolysis in the presence of di-t-butyl peroxide, but no decarboxylation was observed. These compounds do not generate alkyl radicals efficiently when reacted with dibenzoyl peroxide. In each case the major product identified was the corresponding benzoate ester, which resulted from the combination of an alkoxycarbonyl radical and a phenyl radical