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Deciding when to perform maintenance on a
structure can be a hard choice to make.

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Considerations such as availability of the
structure, costs of maintenance

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and risk of failure have to be taken into account.

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Due to these considerations, there is not just a single
solution to the optimum maintenance interval.

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When looking at the availability of the structure,

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maintenance can have both a positive
and a negative effect.

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Maintenance often means the structure has
to go out of service for a period of time.

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Therefore, in the short term, it negatively
impacts availability of the structure.

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However, maintenance will reduce
the chance of a sudden failure,

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and thus will increase future availability.

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For the costs of maintenance, there are multiple
aspects that might influence the choice.

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A general assumption is

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that “the more often maintenance is performed,
the more expensive it will be”.

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However, this is not always the case.

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Most types of damage do not suddenly appear,
but grow over time.

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When these types of damage are found early
enough, small reparations can be done at minimal cost.

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However when the damage has been able
to grow for a while,

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a whole section of rail might have to be replaced,
resulting in far more significant costs!

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Doing maintenance not frequently enough thus
also might increase the total costs of maintenance.

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Risk of failure is maybe the hardest concept
to understand.

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Risk, is defined as chance of an event happening
multiplied by the consequences of this.

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Thus risk will be very different for different
structures and events.

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When considering maintenance for railways,
often the consequences cannot easily be changed.

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This means, the only way to reduce the risk
of an event is to reduce the probability

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of this event happening.
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Depending on the given consequences, a certain
chance of the event happening will be accepted.

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For example, a high speed derailment on a
bridge will have much larger consequences

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than a derailment on a switch
at forty kilometers per hour.

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If you want the risk for both of these events
to be equal, the chance of the derailment

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happening at the bridge should be much lower
than the derailment happening at the low speed switch.

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For maintenance in railways, every decision
is based on a combination of these three elements.

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However, there is not a single best decision
for the optimum maintenance frequency.

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From a general point of view, one would try
to balance costs versus safety.

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But from a scientific point of view, the optimum
balance would be achieved by not only looking

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at the yearly maintenance,
but minimizing the total life-cycle costs.

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This means taking into account the costs of
the design and the construction costs

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divided by the life expectancy of the structure.
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But also should consider the operational costs,
like the maintenance costs,

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unavailability of the structure and the costs of failure,
which often are the hardest to determine.

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Finally, the demolition costs are included as well.

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In total, this optimization is not an easy
one to make, but requires lots of knowledge

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about the system, its wear,
and all the possible modes of failure.

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When we look at maintenance regimes in different
countries, this optimization is hardly ever found.

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In many European countries, for instance,
maintenance is really focused on life safety.

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Any accident on the railways
is considered one too many.

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However, in other countries the availability
of cheap transport might be driving maintenance,

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thus requiring maintenance to be as cheap as possible.

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While this might sound unsafe
from the European point of view,

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rail transport in these countries
still is much safer than road transport.
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In some countries, next to these considerations,
financial gain can also influence the way

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maintenance is done.

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There are cases in which the contractor, is
not the owner of the track, which means conflicts

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of interests can easily arise.

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To prevent this from happening, so called
“Design, Construct and Maintain”

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contracts can be used.

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In these cases a contractor is responsible
for the whole life cycle at a fixed price.

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This has a big advantage:

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during the design phase the contractor can already think
about ways to reduce the costs for maintenance.

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In railways however, these contracts
are still uncommon.

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In summary, we have seen that three main driving
factors for maintenance can be distinguished.

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However, finding the optimum in maintenance
frequency is not a simple task,

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and will depend on many variables,
of which often not all are easily obtained.