Geographic information system-based railway maintenance and renewal system

Increasing demand for railway transportation requires large amounts of money to be spent on maintenance and renewal. In both industrialised and developing countries, one of the main problems of railway companies is regarding track maintenance and renewal. Cost reduction and better control of maintenance processes therefore increase the efficiency of the railway system. The modern railway infrastructure maintenance management system requires a condition-based diagnostic concept covering all railway infrastructure components. This paper describes a decision support system approach, using a tool called MR.GIS (maintenance and renewal based on geographic information system), to analyse the track components and suggests methods for helping the track managers and engineers decide when maintenance is necessary and when is the best time for renewal. The tool enables the users to visualise and analyse the railway track data which is no longer possible using the manual methods. The tool analyses the track with its rich database including decision rules. These decision rules were developed by the specialist professionals and the working procedure of the tool was built on these rules. On the other hand the four major components of GIS, namely encoding, management, analysis and reporting, were integrated with the tool to enable a good advance on planning of maintenance and renewal activities. The developed system was successfully implemented to the railway tracks provided by Turkish State Railways and the expectations of Turkish State Railways were mostly fulfilled.