Modelling Long Term Infrastructure Capacity Evolution and Policy Assessment Regarding Infrastructure Maintenance and Renewal

IMPROVERAIL is a European project launched on July 1st, 2002. Besides several European academic institutes as well as consultants and stakeholders from the Railway industry, the project involves the Swiss Federal Railways, the Swiss Ministry of Transport, SMA-partners, Zürich, and EPFL, Lausanne. The general aim of IMPROVERAIL is to support the establishment of railway infrastructure management in accordance with Directive 91/440 and following, by developing the necessary tools for the modelling of railway infrastructure and access management. First of all, the paper briefly presents the main issues tackled by IMPROVERAIL, highlight-ing their relation to the railways infrastructure management. Then, the paper presents more in depth the work done within the first part of the work package 5 (WP5) of the project, encom-passing three particular topics: • Analysis and rough modelling of long-term infrastructure capacity evolution • Analysis and rough modelling for the assessment of long-term policies regarding in-frastructure maintenance and renewal • Functionality of computer-based decision support system to deal with the long-term dependence between renewal/maintenance and capacity The research results in the conceptualisation of a methodology dealing with the above-mentioned objectives, namely the simultaneous consideration of capacity needs (and invest-ments) and strategic maintenance and renewal policies. In particular, two computer-based tools have been developed. The first tool assesses the capacity of a railway network and esti-mates the value of the capacity, which is related (among other things) to the saturation rate. The second tool simulates long-term policies for railway infrastructure maintenance and re-newal

Le calcul des coûts d'infrastructure de transport en Suisse

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Railway infrastructure maintenance and renewal policy

EU project IMPROVERAI

Strategic evolution of railway corridors infrastructure: dual approach for assessing capacity investments and M&R strategies

Political trends as well as general growth of the transport market set new challenges to railways and particularly to rail infrastructure managers. Rail infrastructure must become more efficient, which is to say that costs must be reduced and the use of capacity optimised, through better timetabling and network adjustments. But above all, rail infrastructure management should tackle strategic issues (on the long-term), hence the need for more adequate planning tools. Nowadays, infrastructure managers tend often to concentrate on operational and short-term problems ; meanwhile, reshaping rail networks requires several years of planning and implementation. In this context , the paper presents a methodology and the bases for the development of an effective decision support system to help infrastructure managers in setting up development strategies for rail corridors or networks. The methodology deals not only with the planning of investments in capacity (timetabling and timetable analyses), but takes also into account the impacts of timetable on the maintenance and renewal policies, in particular through the analysis of interactions between service deteriorations and track possessions. The methodology covers both the analysis of the availability and the reliability of capacity, and the maintainability of the infrastructure as well. The paper shows the importance of the long term planning of rail infrastructures and proposes a way of tackling both the analysis of capacity investments and the elaboration of maintenance and renewal policies. The presented approach is based on two existing software, CAPRES and FASTA, and on a third model, MRPOL, currently under development