Track is the fundamental part of railway infrastructure and represents a significant part of maintenance effort and cost. For example, in Sweden, the annual maintenance cost for only track geometry is between110 and 130 MSEK. The quality of the track, mostly, is represented by the track geometry properties. Track geometry degrades with age and usage; and loses its functionality over time. Poor quality of track geometry may result in safety problems, speed reduction, traffic disruption, greater maintenance cost, and higher degradation rate of the other railway components (e.g. rails, wheels, switches, and crossings). Railway track maintenance program development is challenging and requires appropriate modeling which reflects the real-life scenario and integrates influencing factors. In addition, there are several uncertainties in data collection, data analysis, modeling, and the prediction that are needed to be considered. Moreover, there is a lack of integrated platform that is able to access geometry data, extract associatedinformation, and retain this knowledge for supporting adaptive maintenance planning and scheduling. The above challenges necessitate the Infrastructure Manager (IM) to employ a maintenance management system that enables higher capacity for evaluation of track performance, learning from asset history, context-driven awareness, planning & scheduling, and transformation of this information to knowledge for decision making. The SIMTRACK project will facilitate simulation-based platform that enables development of a tools,methodologies and techniques for optimization of track geometry maintenance planning, scheduling andopportunistic maintenance. This will provide a basis to predict track geometry degradation, analyse therisk of failures and forecast the maintenance activities as well as renewal investment requirements. The results will enhance safety, maximize capacity utilization, and lead to an efficient and cost effective maintenance program. The project structure track is structured into 6 work packages. WP1 deals with the project management. WP2 presentsthe industrial scenarios, specifications and requirements that provide inputs to WP3 and WP4. WP3 andWP4 are defined as predictive modelling and analytics of track geometry condition and trackmaintenance optimization and decision support system respectively. WP5 is dedicated to evaluation ofabsolute track geometry condition. Finally, WP6 deals with dissemination and exploitation, is devotedfor formulating comprehensive plans for results assimilation by the partners and set the ground for theexploitation. Figure 1 shows the work packages and their relationships.Simtrac
