Big Data in Railway O&M: A Dependability Approach

Railway systems are complex with respect to technology and operations with the involvement of a wide range of human actors, organizations and technical solutions. For the operations and control of such complexity, a viable solution is to apply intelligent computerized systems, for instance, computerized traffic control systems for coordinating airline transportation, or advanced monitoring and diagnostic systems in vehicles. Moreover, transportation assets cannot compromise the safety of the passengers by only applying operation and maintenance activities. Indeed, safety is a more difficult goal to achieve using traditional maintenance strategies and computerized solutions come into the picture as the only option to deal with complex systems interacting among them and trying to balance the growth in technical complexity together with stable and acceptable dependability indexes. Big data analytics are expected to improve the overall performance of the railways supported by smart systems and Internetbased solutions. Operation and Maintenance will be application areas, where benefits will be visible as a consequence of big data policies due to diagnosis and prognosis capabilities provided to the whole network of processes. This chapter shows the possibilities of applying the big data concept in the railway transportation industry and the positive effects on technology and operations from a systems perspective.