A computational intelligence approach to railway track intervention planning

Derek BARTRAM, Michael BURROW, Xin YAO

Research output: Book Chapters | Papers in Conference ProceedingsBook ChapterResearchpeer-review

9 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Railway track intervention planning is the process of specifying the location and time of required maintenance and renewal activities. To facilitate the process, decision support tools have been developed and typically use an expert system built with rules specified by track maintenance engineers. However, due to the complex interrelated nature of component deterioration, it is problematic for an engineer to consider all combinations of possible deterioration mechanisms using a rule based approach. To address this issue, this chapter describes an approach to the intervention planning using a variety of computational intelligence techniques. The proposed system learns rules for maintenance planning from historical data and incorporates future data to update the rules as they become available thus the performance of the system improves over time. To determine the failure type, historical deterioration patterns of sections of track are first analyzed. A Rival Penalized Competitive Learning algorithm is then used to determine possible failure types. We have devised a generalized two stage evolutionary algorithm to produce curve functions for this purpose. The approach is illustrated using an example with real data which demonstrates that the proposed methodology is suitable and effective for the task in hand. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationA Computational Intelligence Approach to Railway Track Intervention Planning
EditorsTina YU, Lawrence DAVIS, Cem BAYDAR, Rajkumar ROY
PublisherSpringer
Chapter8
Pages163-198
Number of pages36
ISBN (Electronic)9783540757719
ISBN (Print)9783540757702
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2008
Externally publishedYes

Publication series

NameStudies in Computational Intelligence
PublisherSpringer
Volume86
ISSN (Print)1860-949X
ISSN (Electronic)1860-9503

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