Life cycle cost analysis for managing rail infrastructure

In the last decade managing railway infrastructure in Europe has changed compared to the century preceding it. Due to the restructuring of railways, which has resulted in separate Infrastructure Management and increasing performance demands from governments and Transport Operating Companies, infrastructure performance has become an important issue. Reliability requirements, budget limits, and operational conditions, such as the time available for maintenance, are becoming increasingly strict. As a response Infrastructure Managers (IMs) have started to develop computer-based tools for a quantitative analysis of the (long-term) impacts of design and maintenance decisions. In this paper an approach based on Life Cycle Costing has been developed, which is able to support decision-making on design and maintenance quantitatively, even in absence of sophisticated maintenance planning tools, using expert judgement beside empirical data. Key to the approach is a decision support system (DSS) for analysing the long-term impacts of design and maintenance decisions on reliability, availability and cost of ownership. The DSS concept and its application during the tender for the Dutch High-Speed Line are presented. Both results and obstacles are discussed. Especially in a design phase a lot of uncertainty is involved in the analysis. The DSS proves to be a valuable tool for testing the robustness of design and maintenance decisions and for focusing the discussion on the important cost-driving factors.