Selection of maintenance actions using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP): decision-making in railway infrastructure

Abstract

A methodology for prioritising between different maintenance actions in the railway infrastructure is presented. The consistency of the prioritisation and the feasibility of the applied methodology are investigated. Criteria describing the diverse effects of maintenance are developed and presented to track managers, together with a set of maintenance actions that are specific for each track manager. Then, the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is used to obtain preferences for the criteria and for the different actions. The track managers roughly agree on the prioritisation of criteria. However, the discrepancies between the results of the two ways employed to elicit the preferences for the actions are rather large. The track managers consider it easy to understand the rationale of the AHP and to enter their preferences. It is proposed that preferences are recorded as they are in this paper, in order to document the rationale of the decisions and to facilitate mutual learning among decision-makers and over time.

Keywords:

• railway infrastructure management
• multi-criteria decision-making
• analytic hierarchy process (AHP)
• maintenance allocation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Banverket and the EU regional fund for financial support. The authors are grateful to the staff at Banverket, especially the track managers who were subjects in the experiments: Christer Ahlin, Stefan Blomgren, Jakob Fors, Benny Harryson, Sune Johansson and Per-Erik Kenttä. Thanks also to Professor Uday Kumar and the colleagues at the Division of Operation and Maintenance Engineering for useful suggestions on the paper.