The railway infrastructure is an important factor for the costs and performance of rail transport. The performance of the infrastructure (for example, safety, availability and reliability) is an important aspect of design and maintenance decisionmaking, since the assets have a long life span and design choices are hard to change. In the restructured railway setting the infrastructure manager faces increasing performance requirements. Since design and maintenance still are mainly processes driven by technical procedures, a set of tools to justify design and maintenance choices on a level of `functional specifications' (life cycle costs, availability and reliability) is missing. In this paper, a decision support system (DSS) is described which can serve as a first step towards such a set of tools. The DSS combines maintenance data with data from transport operations and financial data in order to estimate the system performance. The DSS use during the consultation phase of the HSL-Zuid Infrastructure Provider contract tender showed the lack of reliable maintenance data. In developing performance contracts this should be well considered. The DSS can provide a framework for selecting the important maintenance conditions, which should be part of such a risk allocation. (A)
Abstract