Sustainable Maintenance and Analysis of Rail Transport Infrastructure (SMART rail)

Safe and efficient transport infrastructure is a fundamental requirement to facilitate and encourage the movement of goods throughout the European Union. Currently there are in the region of 215,000km of railway lines in the EU. Many of these were not built to conform to modern design standards and suffer from poor maintenance strategies. The SMART Rail project brings together experts in the field of rail transport infrastructure from across Europe to develop state of the art inspection, monitoring and assessment techniques. This will allow rail operators to manage ageing infrastructure in a cost effective and environmentally friendly manner. RODIS will develop models to greatly improve the ability of the track owners to predict the future condit ion of the ir infrastructure. A probability based framework will be developed for optimised whole life management of the infrastructural elements. This will encompass not just bridges but all aspects of rail infrastructure such as track susceptibility to settlement and the stability of slopes and embankments. Sensor information will be incorporated into the structural safety models allowing real time analysis to be performed. This will enable the rate of deterioration of the infrastructure elements to be determined and allow implementation of an optimised and cost effective intervention strategy before any significant damage occurs.