Recent research and development activities in maintenance technologies for electric railway power supply systems

Abstract

In order to ensure reliability and stability of the electric railway systems, adequate maintenance operation for the electric power supply system is an essential matter. On the other hands, its maintenance operation involves high cost, because this system has a huge spatial scale. Furthermore, working population in Japan has been decreasing today, resulting in high demands on improving efficiency of the maintenance operation. RTRI has therefore been tackling the issue of improving in quality, efficiency and cost of the maintenance operation for the electric power supply system. This paper describes recent RTRI's research and development activities on the maintenance technologies for the power supply system in order to overcome these issues.