Optimised management of railway networks, subjected to increasing travelling loads and degradation of track components, requires deep understanding and analysis of degradation phenomena. Ballast differential settlement causes an increase in track geometrical irregularity, decreasing passenger’s comfort, and can cause local failure of the railway line. The focus of this thesis work is the analysis of available long-term measurements of ballasted track geometrical irregularity profile coming from a set of regional railway lines.
Main purposes of the thesis work are:
- Improve the model for the plan and scheduling of future maintenance interventions.
- Select and assess statistical models able to represent the overall status of a branch of a railway line, so as to gather an immediate and meaningful view of the evolution of the status of a railway line;
- Extract indicative and meaningful information from the processing of available data.
Contacts: Lorenzo Bernardini, Andrea Collina
