LIFE-CYCLE COST ANALYSIS FOR RAIL CONTROL SYSTEMS

Railway infrastructure, as a part of global transport system, is a complex technical system that should deliver long life, high availability, safety and reliability as well as low maintenance cost. Railroad restructuring in many countries has led to separate infrastructure management. Infrastructure operators therefore should consider growing requirements of operating companies. To meet their requirements, infrastructure managers must continuously optimize operational and maintenance costs. Into budget planning they must include growing requirements for the reliability and availability of infrastructure as well as crucial issue - the traffic safety. The experiences of operating systems show that often engineering system ownership cost is many times greater than the cost of its acquisition. Therefore, today, in the global economy purchasing decisions of many technical systems, especially those expensive are not taken on the basis of preliminary acquisition costs. One of the methods, which is able to support right investment decisions-making is Life-Cycle Cost (LCC) analysis. It is suitable to determine the costs of the whole life cycle of the system, i.e. the costs of acquisition, operation and liquidation. Thus, it allows to minimize investment risk because it includes total calculation for each option and not just the initial investment costs. In the article the considerations will be conducted in relation to life-cycle cost for rail control systems. In their case, this is the part of recommended for use with this kind of system RAMS/LCC analysis. Requirements for RAMS/LCC analysis are defined in EU directives and its methodology is included in CENELEC standards.