Composite indicator for railway infrastructure management

The assessment and analysis of railway infrastructure capacity is an essential task in railway infrastructure management carried out to meet the required quality and capacity demand of railway transport. For sustainable and dependable infrastructure management, it is important to assess railway capacity limitation from the point of view of infrastructure performance. However, the existence of numerous performance indicators often leads to diffused information that is not in a format suitable to support decision making. In this paper, we demonstrated the use of fuzzy inference system for aggregating selected railway infrastructure performance indicators to relate maintenance function to capacity situation. The selected indicators consider the safety, comfort, punctuality and reliability aspects of railway infrastructure performance. The resulting composite indicator gives a reliable quantification of the health condition or integrity of railway lines. A case study of the assessment of overall infrastructure performance which is an indication of capacity limitation is presented using indicator data between 2010 and 2012 for five lines on the network of Trafikverket (Swedish Transport Administration). The results are presented using customised performance dashboard for enhanced visualisation, quick understanding and relevant comparison of infrastructure conditions for strategic management. This gives additional information on capacity status and limitation from maintenance management perspective.