Keywords: railway, maintenance, management, performance, indicator, KPI, MPI.

Railway traffic has increased over the last decade and it is expected to increase further with the movement of transportation from road to rail, arising from increasing energy costs and the demand to reduce emissions. The key goals of the White Paper 2011 on the European transport system include; a 50% shift of medium distance intercity passenger and freight journeys from road to rail and waterborne transport, and a 60% cut in transport CO₂ emissions by 2050 [1]. The available capacity of the railways has to be enhanced in order to meet these new transportation demands. To manage the assets effectively within the business objectives, the effect of maintenance activities must be measured and monitored. Performance indicators (PIs) for dependability, capacity, punctuality etc. are continuously identified and developed to support infrastructure managers in decision making, but they are often ad-hoc and seldom standardised. Measuring entails data collection, but since raw data does not give any information by itself, these must be analysed, validated and converted to information in the correct format for decision making. This consumes resources, especially if the wrong parameters are measured. It is therefore crucial to thoroughly analyse what to measure, as high costs and equally large savings are associated with measuring. Thus, there exists a need to study the railway PIs used by different infrastructure managers, to find out which ones are the most important, which are required and which are not required.

A study was undertaken to review the railway infrastructure maintenance PIs used by researchers and European infrastructure managers. Increased interoperability and building of a trans-European railway network is another goal of the European Union. The required harmonisation and standardisation of the management of railways have led to increased useage of European standards. The identified PIs have therefore been compared to the European standard; Maintenance Key Performance Indicators, EN 15341, in order to find indicators in common [2].

Several projects on indicators and benchmarks for railway transport operations have been carried out [3,4,5], but similar works on the maintenance aspect are few, as can be seen in [6].

In this paper, about 130 maintenance performance indicators for railway infrastructures have been mapped and compared with indicators from EN 15341 [2]. Similar indicators have been considered as one indicator. The listed indicators form a basis for constructing a maintenance performance measurement system for railway infrastructures.

1

White Paper, "White Paper: Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area - Towards a Competitive and Resource Efficient Transport System", European Commission, Brussels, 2011.

2

EN 15341, "Maintenance - Maintenance Key Performance Indicators", CEN - European Committee for Standardization, Brussel, 2007.

3

IMPROVERAIL, "Improved Tools for Railway Capacity and Access Management: D2 Benchmarking Methodologies and Harmonisation of Concepts in the Railway Sector", Competitive and Sustainable Growth Programme, 2001.

4

EQUIP, "Extending the Quality of Public Transport: Final Report", UR-98-RS.3076. TRKC (Transport Research Knowledge Centre), 2000. URL

5

UTBI, "The Urban Transport Benchmarking Initiative: Year One Final Report", Transport Research Knowledge Centre (TRKC), 2004. URL

6

T. Åhrén, "Maintenance Performance Indicators (MPIs) for Railway Infrastructure: Identification and Analysis for Improvement", Division of Operation and Maintenance Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, 2008.

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