Heuristic forecasting of geometry deterioration of high speed railway tracks

Abstract

Travelling safely and comfortably on high speed railway lines requires excellent conditions of the whole railway infrastructure in general and of the railway track geometry in particular. In this framework, a reliable forecasting of the railway geometry ageing process is indispensable for an optimal planning and scheduling of maintenance activities. For this reason the French railway operator SNCF has been measuring periodically the geometrical characteristics of its high speed network for more than 20 years now. In this paper a hybrid system forecasting model is presented. It uses a grey-box approach: a model structure and its constraints are specified basing on previous process knowledge, then the optimal set of parameter values is searched. Since the process is non linear the parameters are searched by means of the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm. Finally, the method is applied on real data of a French high speed TGV line and its results compared with those of benchmark approaches. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.