Risk-based Maintenance for Rail Fasteners

Rail fasteners are important for track configuration. Failures can lead to misalignments in the rail with respect to the sleepers and compromises in track resilience. These can in turn lead to undesired consequences such as derailment and aggravated damages to other track components. Unfortunately, the current inspection and maintenance regime for rail fasteners does not adequately address the credible failure modes (Setsobhonkul et al., 2017). It also tends to be reactive with potential for further optimization in terms of resource allocation. In response to these improvement opportunities, a risk-based maintenance philosophy, driven by a risk management framework, had been proposed for rail fasteners. This study focuses on the development of the enabling framework and the subsequent demonstration and analysis of which.