Improving the Maintenance of Railway Switches through Proactive Approach

A strong necessity for faster mass transport with high capacities and frequent runs has put pressure on railway infrastructure. These changes require an improvement in the maintenance activities that need to be planned carefully to reduce as much as possible their impacts on the actual use of the infrastructure. As a consequence, it is crucial to continuously monitor the technical equipment of the railroad tracks in the most efficient way. Railway switches operate in harsh environmental conditions. However, their reliability requirements are high due to safety and economic factors. Their maintenance depends on the data collected and the decisions on due corrective actions. The more frequent the data collection, the shorter the decision cycle; and the more intuitive the data visualization, the better the confidence in the system. This paper presents some tangible results, where the MANTIS concepts were applied to the use-case of railway switches to introduce continuous monitoring and proactive maintenance of the railroad tracks. The presented results include the measurement method; the analysis of the measured data; the profiling and modelling of the physical behaviour of the switch, including the recognized need to have separate models per season; and the visualization of the gathered data.