Implications of Climate Change in Life Cycle Cost Analysis of Railway Infrastructure

Extreme weather conditions from climate change, including high or low temperatures, snow and ice, flooding, storms, sea level rise, low visibility, etc., can damage railway infrastructure. These incidents severely affect the reliability of the railway infrastructure and the acceptable service level. Due to the inherent complexity of the railway system, quantifying the impacts of climate change on railway infrastructure and associated expenses has been challenging. To address these challenges, railway infrastructure managers must adopt a climate-resilient approach that considers all cost components related to the life cycle of railway assets. This approach involves implementing climate adaptation measures to reduce the life cycle costs (LCC) of railway infrastructure while maintaining the reliability and safety of the network. Therefore, it is critical for infrastructure managers to predict "How will maintenance cost be affected due to climate change on different RCP's scenarios?"

The proposed model integrates operation and maintenance costs with reliability and availability parameters such as mean time to failure (MTTF) and mean time to repair (MTTR). The proportional hazard model (PHM) is used to reflect the dynamic effect of climate change by capturing the trend variation in MTTF and MTTR. A use case from a railway in North Sweden is studied and analyzed to validate the process. Data collected over a 20-year period is analyzed for the chosen use case. As a main result, this study has revealed that climate change may significantly influence the LCC of switch and crossing (S&C) and can help managers to predict the required budget.

Keywords: Life Cycle Cost (LCC) analysis, Switch and Crossing(S&C), Railway infrastructure, Climate adaptation.

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