What is Ecotrack in short?
The costs of permanent way and its maintenance are substantial and form a large part of total infrastructure expenditure. Any reduction of these costs has a significant impact on the overall efficiency of the infrastructure management. It is therefore of primary importance to those responsible for the state of permanent way and its maintenance that it is kept at a given quality level for the period required, but with minimum total expenditure. Using the Decision Support System Ecotrack ARCADIS can fulfil these requirements by minimising investments and maintenance costs and maximising performance of the rail system.
The process of determining whether, when, where and how to intervene, of deciding on optimum allocation of resources and minimizing the cost is a very complex problem: different track sections tend to behave differently under the effects of loading.
Decision-making processes for Maintenance and Renewal (M&R) work are closely interrelated technically and economically. Decision-making for M&R plans is based on a large quantity of technical and economic information, extensive knowledge, and above all experience.
By means of Ecotrack software we can assist railway infrastructure companies to plan expenditure and the financial consequences of their M&R policies. Running through the stages of the input-diagnosis-output-process, we reach the most optimum solutions to your management and maintenance issues.
Features of the Ecotrack system:
- It objectively analyses the track, based on both the technical and the economic aspects;
- It produces an optimal plan for several years in advance for the most important M&R work, i.e. the work that accounts for most of the track M&R expenditure;
- It produces a sound base for optimal resource allocation;
- It calculates the economically most optimal maintenance programming within the technical requirements;
- It provides a modular system with an interface to use the existing data of the individual railway infrastructure companies;
- It uses standard rules that can be easily modified to suit each individual infrastructure company's practice. However, it is still a flexible system;
- It provides instant reference to data on all track components, their level of use and M&R history;
- It permits maintenance to be carried out to a fixed budget, therefore allowing decisions to be made;
- It estimates a budget according to the suggested M&R plan and rewards or penalises decisions.
Thus, the Decision Support System for Track Maintenance Management for railways of Ecotrack facilitates a technically and economically optimised performance of railway networks.
