Keywords: RAM, reliability, availability, maintainability, train mission, railway infrastructure, technical performance, logistic support, maintenance decision support.

Railway infrastructure is a linearly distributed asset which has different hierarchical levels such as lines, operational sections, assemblies, modules and maintainable components. The management and performance evaluation of the entire system is done at suitable hierarchical level for efficiency and practicality. It is ideal to assess the integrity as well as the reliability, availability and maintainability (RAM) of the infrastructure on the level of operational sections which are established technical divisions used for traffic operational management by infrastructure administrations. There are several approaches that are used to evaluate the RAM characteristics of a system. This paper presents an approach for RAM simulation of railway operational sections using an event based simulation tool with the Monte Carlo technique. The input data used in the RAM modelling includes: historical maintenance and failure data between 2010 and 2012, planned train mission and possible preventive maintenance plans. The outcome of the simulation is the estimation of different RAM parameters over a period of one year. Amongst the parameters are: the expected number of failures and the downtime per operational section, states of each operational section and the overall dependability measure of the line in terms of the success of the planned traffic. These parameters are integrity measures of the asset which can be used for traffic simulation for effective management of traffic. They are also useful for logistic support planning that is required for cost effective and highly dependable infrastructure management.

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