Abstract:
The maintenance of railway tracks is one of the aspects of the railway infrastructure management
activity that most influences the technical and economic performance of this transportation
system. It is common practice to support the maintenance actions based on the
monitoring of the infrastructure condition, for example by carrying out visual inspections
and using dedicated track inspection vehicles. Despite the fact that this traditional approach
to evaluate the track, based on its condition, is quite effective, it does not provide useful
information on the causes that lead to such reduction in performance. Consequently, the
maintenance tends to be more corrective and less preventive. Considering the limitations of
the available methods, a R&D project is underway in Portugal aiming at designing, developing
and demonstrating the applicability of an innovative and integrated approach to assess the
performance of railway tracks, which is also expected to contribute to identifying the causes
of some track malfunctions. In this paper we discuss the relevant aspects of this approach
and present preliminary results of the tasks currently underway, namely the design and development
of the prototype system, including the verification of the measurement chain and
its validation in laboratory environment.