REVIEW ARTICLE
Degradation Prediction of Rail Tracks: A Review of the Existing Literature
Najwa Elkhoury, Lalith Hitihamillage, Sara Moridpour*, Dilan Robert
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2018Volume: 12
First Page: 88
Last Page: 104
Publisher ID: TOTJ-12-88
DOI: 10.2174/1874447801812010088
Article History:
Received Date: 18/10/2017Revision Received Date: 29/1/2018
Acceptance Date: 09/02/2018
Electronic publication date: 28/02/2018
Collection year: 2018
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
In the past few decades, the railway infrastructure has been widely expanded in urban and rural areas, making it the most complex matrix of rail transport networks. Safe and comfortable travel on railways has always been a common goal for transportation engineers and researchers, and requires railways in excellent condition and well-organized maintenance practices. Degradation of rail tracks is a main concern for railway organizations as it affects the railway’s behaviour and its parameters, such as track geometry, speed, traffic and loads. Therefore, the prediction of the degradation of rail tracks is very important in order to optimise maintenance needs, reduce maintenance and operational costs of railways, and improve rail track conditions.
This paper provides a comprehensive review of rail degradation prediction models, their parameters, and the strengths and weaknesses of each model. A comprehensive discussion of existing research and a comparison of different models of degradation of rail tracks is also provided. Finally, this review presents concluding remarks on the limitations of existing studies and provides recommendations for further research and appraisal practices.