Benefit of railway infrastructure diagnosis systems on its availability

In recent years, new diagnosis systems for railway infrastructure have been developed and launched to commercial market. Their major objective is to increase the availability of railway infrastructure and its external systems by means of preventive maintenance, anticipating malfunctions and failures. The acquisition and installation of such systems comprises the investment of large amounts of money. In order to predict the potential benefit, it would be meaningful to model the current infrastructure maintenance process and simulate the effects of the introduction of a diagnosis system. In this work a Petri net based modelling method for Monte Carlo simulation is presented, and validated by a case study of a French high speed line.