The Swedish railway is composed of several stakeholders, each one with individual objectives and strategies. Although maintenance data used by all, data sharing is not common. Due to this, the lack of data sharing, effects maintenance decision making negatively.

To support the collaboration necessary for data sharing, decision support tools and enhanced information and communication technologies are needed. Solutions have been successfully developed through research within the eMaintenance field. Research in ICT and maintenance have been conducted in the eMaintenance Lab at Luleå Railway Research Center (JVTC) at Luleå University of Technology, for more than a decade.

Condition based maintenance is enabled by implementing eMaintenance research results in the ePilot-project, in order to create a collaboration platform; which can transform the Swedish fragmented rail industry to an integrated system, from an organizational and technical point of view. Today, 25 sub-projects has been completed covering solutions e.g. system for predicting degradation of wheel and rail using data from way-side and mobile monitoring equipment and new inspection techniques.

The paper aims to describe some of the key factors that might enable or hinder the collaboration, sharing of data and implementation of good results, jointly creating the best prerequisites for the operation and maintenance of the railway system.

The goal of the project is to improve punctuality and minimize disruption in rail services. The project is an industry collaboration between JVTC, the Swedish Transport Administration, railway actors and innovators in Sweden.

In 116 thermographic measurements of 66 healthy male participants, 44 of whom were measured at least twice, hand skin temperature distributions before and after a cold stress test (CST) were examined to identify any typical characteristics of hand skin rewarming. On each hand, measurements from 18 regions of interest recorded every 10 s were used to calculate the surface average temperature. Temperatures at baseline (Tb), directly after cooling (Tc), and after 15 min of rewarming (Tf) were used for comparison and the averages of each finger, palm, and hand were analyzed. Using fits of normal distribution for the measured data, final hand skin temperatures were divided into two groups, A and B, with a calculated boundary at 25.4 °C. Digital analyses of all thermograms were performed to describe the process, and each group's rewarming patterns were observed. Group A was considered to demonstrate warm rewarming, since the whole hands reached a Tf approximately equal to the Tb. By contrast, Group B demonstrated cold rewarming and had whole hand Tf less than Tb. The predictive value of Tc was lower than that of Tb in Group A, whereas the opposite occurred in Group B. Altogether, the findings suggest different hand skin temperature rewarming patterns in healthy males.

Infrastructure managers (IMs) need to plan their maintenance work about 1½–2 years before a new train time table (TTT) comes into force to minimise the effect on traffic. Maintenance work that is planned in less than 1 year ahead of the TTT has to compete with, or need to be fitted into, operators’ applications for capacity. However, maintenance work is at times planned only a few weeks before execution, and depending on the railway line in question, a few hours during night can be available for maintenance. In addition, sudden failures in track normally require repair immediately or within a day. If rail transportation increases, it also becomes harder to find time in track for maintenance. Therefore, it is of interest to simulate maintenance tasks between trains to minimise track maintenance possession time. Such simulation can be used to: study maintenance work in TTTs with random and regular train departures; study the effect of exceeding allocated maintenance windows; and to study the effect of increase in train frequency. In this paper, Monte Carlo method is applied to simulate track maintenance between trains as a function of train frequency.

The Swedish railway is after deregulation composed, of several different stakeholders, each one with individual objectives and strategies to maintain their assets and rolling stock. Although some maintenance data are common between the stakeholders, no greater sharing of these data exists. The insufficient data availability impacts the effectiveness in maintenance decision making.The Luleå Railway Research Center (JVTC) has in more than a decade conducted research in eMaintenance. One of the objectives with eMaintenance research is to develop maintenance decision support tools through enhanced use of information and communication technology for data analytics from various data sources. These tools can also be used to enable condition based maintenance to minimize disruptions and optimise the maintenance cost in a railway system. Another objective this research is to discover how to offer operators, infrastructure managers and system integrators access to central computerised data to support decision making within operation and maintenance.eMaintenance solutions for railway are now being implemented in a pilot project called ePilot119 in the northern part of Sweden on track section 119 between Luleå and Boden. ePilot119 delivers a collaborative platform aimed to enable the development of eMaintenance solutions based on the needs and requirements from various stakeholders. These solutions are expected to enable and transform the Swedish fragmented rail industry to an integrated system, both from an organizational and technical point of view. Some of the objectives are to enhance the sharing of data, developing decision support, define the information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and transform ePilot119 to a common natural process for sharing maintenance decision support for the railway.However, implementing eMaintenance solutions to support effective and efficient maintenance decision-making related to a complex technical system (i.e. railway) and with a large number of heterogeneous stakeholders is challenging, and requires appropriate tools (e.g. framework, approaches, methodologies, and technologies).Hence, this paper aims to identify some of the significant factors which need to be considered in order to develop an appropriate implementation process and collaboration platform, which aim to facilitate maintenance decision-making through eMaintenance solutions. By identifying these factors that might hinder the execution of the project and implementation of good results, there is a possibility to jointly create the best prerequisites for the operation and maintenance of the railway system.

Rail traffic has increased manifold during the last decade. This development and the need for shift transportation from road to rail to decrease CO2 emission, creates a challenge for the railway industry to improve capacity in the network. The challenge is to do more effective inspection and maintenance in less time. An EU project ‘AUTOMAIN’ was initiated to optimize and automate maintenance and inspection activities with introduction of new planning and scheduling tools and methodologies. The project looked into reducing the maintenance possession time by around 40%. The project aim was to; adopt best practices from other industries in maintenance optimization, developing novel track inspection approaches for freight routes. The scope was for in-train measuring and self-inspecting switch, researching and assessing innovations that can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of large scale inspection and maintenance processes with a scope on track and switch maintenance, track inspection; developing key technologies that will drive the development of modular infrastructure design, and developing a new maintenance planning and scheduling tool to optimize the maintenance activities, taking account of the benefits brought about by other improvements in this project.The Consortium composition covers the railway maintenance and inspection field like; infrastructure managers, contractors, train operating companies, railway component industry, research organizations, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and railway industry related organizations. In this paper, the authors have tried to summarize the methodology and results achieved in this project and how it has achieved the reduced maintenance possession time for higher railway traffic movements.

The measurement and improvement of track quality are key issues in determining both the restoration time and cost of railway maintenance. Applying the optimal tamping strategy helps reduce maintenance costs, making operations more cost effective and leading to increased safety and passenger comfort. In this paper, track geometry data from the iron ore line (Malmbanan) in northern Sweden, which handles both passenger and freight trains, are used to evaluate track geometry maintenance in cold climate. The paper describes Trafikverket’s (Swedish Transport Administration) tamping strategy and evaluates its effectiveness in measuring, reporting, and improving track quality. Finally, it evaluates the performance of the maintenance contractor and discusses the importance of the functional requirements stated in the outsourcing contracts.