Keywords: robustness, railway, infrastructure.

The demands for railway transportation have increased over the last decade and it shows no signs of decreasing in the future. In many parts of Europe the railway infrastructure have become stressed with growing traffic density, a changing climate and assets that are aging, as well as a number of organizational issues. Thus, measurement of the condition of the infrastructure and the maintenance actions are becoming even more important.

Traditionally within railway infrastructure assets have been managed through technical parameters for each asset, hence the overall functionality has not been given the same attention. As for the EU white paper guidelines, the infrastructure managers are working out new goals to meet with these objectives. One of the areas is robustness of the infrastructure. This paper discuss the definition of robustness and how robustness is used within other fields and industries.

Railway infrastructure should be healthy and strong enough to withstand unforeseen situations, capable of performing under a wide range of conditions and be strongly formed and constructed. In other words, railway infrastructure needs to be robust. Robustness is used in various areas, such as evolutionary biology, structural engineering, decision making and statistics. From a railway infrastructure perspective, it needs to be clear what the differences between these robustness concepts are and which parameters can support in managing railway infrastructure robustness. In this paper the authors have presented and discussed the definition of robustness in detail within various fields and how robustness can be used for railway infrastructure. The definition has a close relationship with the areas of dependability and safety.

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