Modeling of impact of operations and maintenance on safety, availability, capacity, and cost of Railways-A System dynamics approach

the transport infrastructure, particularly the railway infrastructure plays a vital role in the delivery of freight and the transportation of people. The ability and reliability of the railway infrastructure to deliver goods and transport people are challenged by train derailments and collisions caused by infrastructure breakdowns. Lack of maintenance has been identified as one of the causes of infrastructure breakdowns leading to accidents. The current paper proposes that if the railway infrastructure safety, availability, capacity, and cost are modeled using system dynamics, the impact of infrastructure operation and maintenance on safety can be predicted more accurately. The paper follows systems thinking approach that aims to understand the railway infrastructure as a system, by defining the system structure, system component relationships, and system behavior. The impact on railway infrastructure is modeled using system dynamics by developing causal loop diagrams and stock and flow diagrams which define the system structure, and system component relationships, and models the system behavior of safety, availability, capacity, and cost.