asset management

There is an overwhelming focus on sustainability these days. Issues related to carbon emissions, global warming, exponentially growing landfills, rampant energy wastages, etc., which seemed conceptual a decade or two ago, are a reality hitting everyone harder than ever before. Most people are yearning to play a role in contributing to the world’s sustainability goals, which is a very good step!

Seldom do railways have the resources to maintain their infrastructure at a level that ensures steady-state performance. Rather, they are faced with prioritizing maintenance actions to optimize safety and reliability under the burden of constrained resources. Given this reality, railway operations are finding the solution to work more efficiently lies in using information technology. By harnessing the vast amount of existing rail corridor data in a prioritized plan and then assigning the work and monitoring the execution and results with software, many railways are doing more with less resources. This strategy is called linear asset decision support (LADS) and it not only results in steady-state asset performance under constrained resources, it also can improve the asset condition and provide a positive return on investment.