Life Cycle Costing applied to railway design and maintenance: creating a dashboard for infrastructure performance planning

摘要

The restructuring of the railways in the European Union and the increasing number of 'Build, Operate and Transfer' contracts necessitate performance-based infrastructure management. Since 1998 Delft University of Technology provides a decision support system (DSS) for analysing the long-term impacts of design and maintenance decisions in relation to future maintenance and traffic conditions. A computer tool combines is used to estimate total life cycle costs. Infrastructure availability and reliability forecasts are included in these estimates. In this paper DSS design is described and the effectiveness of the decision support in a real-life case study is briefly demonstrated. The DSS proved to be valuable, as it enabled testing the cost-effectiveness of decision alternatives.