Stochastic Rail Wear Model for Railroad Tracks

This paper describes the development of a stochastic rail wear model. Once validated, the model can be used to assist in the strategic assessment of railroad track funding needs. The algorithms used for simulating rail wear use Markov processes, and the resulting transition probability matrix define...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inTransportation research record Vol. 2289; no. 1; pp. 103 - 110
Main Authors Costello, Seosamh B., Premathilaka, Anuradha S., Dunn, Roger C. M.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.01.2012
Subjects
Mathematical analysis
Mathematical models
Matrices
Matrix methods
Rails
Rails (railroad)
Transition probabilities
Wear
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Summary:This paper describes the development of a stochastic rail wear model. Once validated, the model can be used to assist in the strategic assessment of railroad track funding needs. The algorithms used for simulating rail wear use Markov processes, and the resulting transition probability matrix defines rail wear progression, as opposed to the more familiar regression-type model popular with engineers. The New Zealand railroad track database contained 10 years of rail wear data from which to develop and validate the model. The transition probability matrices for use in the model were developed with the first 5 years of the historical rail wear data, with the remaining 5 years set aside to validate the model. The development of the transition probability matrices is reported in the paper, together with the development of the initial condition distributions ready for use in validation of the model.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:0361-1981
2169-4052
DOI:10.3141/2289-14