The maintenance of railway infrastructure has in several instances been changed from government-based to being based on public procurement, with varying degrees of flexibility for the contractor to design their maintenance work. The purpose of-giving contractors a larger freedom of choice of how to perform maintenance is to stimulate them to innovate and develop their maintenance processes. Since the contracts differ in between and there are changes in government policies over time that affects both existing and new contracts, a comparison between different contracts becomes challenging. A literature review has been conducted to understand the change in procurement strategy and how to encourage contractors to innovate. The research questions include: What procurement strategies are there? How is maintenance evaluated? How does procurement affect the innovation opportunities for entrepreneurs?

The literature review focuses on railway maintenance and contract design between client and contractor. In total, 17 articles matched the search criteria and were selected for the review. To have successful maintenance service, five articles suggested partnering as a strategy with common goals in combination with good communication during the entirety of the contract. When selecting incentive plan, four articles mentions that a focus on performance-based incentives in combination with riskmanagement is better rather than actual payment schemes. The reason being that payment is often themain cause of conflicts between client and contractor. The scientific literature suggests that improvement in incentives improves quality of maintenance, decreases delays and technical failures. The conclusion from the literature review is that partnering in railway maintenance is considered successful. With accurate knowledge about railway assets the incentive plan becomes accurate which reduces costs.

The literature review is a part of a research project with an overall goal to develop a model to guide the selection of appropriate type of procurement strategy, contract and control of maintenance for a moresustainable railway system.

Swedish railway infrastructure maintenance has been outsourced through gradualexposure since 2002. The idea behind outsourcing was to reduce cost and improveefficiency. However, railway maintenance cost has increased faster than railwaymaintenance operations, resulting in neglected railway maintenance. Since railwayoperation is governed by the contract design the purpose of this paper was to explore therelationship between contract design and maintenance outcome within Swedish railwayinfrastructure maintenance. To explore this relationship linear regression analysis wasused. The result indicates that asset knowledge and accessibility to the track areimportant to consider for improving maintenance operations.

Railway maintenance is highly important for a sustainable transport system. A popular choice in Europe is to outsource the railway maintenance obligation through a public procurement process. Public procurement of railway maintenance has gained relatively little attention in research despite that the competitive tendering approach implies several challenges, especially related to collaboration and innovation. Hence, the aim of this study is to explore public procurement of railway maintenance, with a particular focus on how various factors support or hinder collaboration and innovation. A multiple case study approach is used, including interviews with client and contractor representatives and a multidimensional framework on partnering as supply chain integration guides the analysis. Tentative findings indicate that there is potential in strengthening the supply chain integration in the studied context. Findings provide theoretical contribution to supply chain integration, for example by pinpointing the importance of addressing informal relationships at the individual level in maintenance contracts. Furthermore, a practical implication for managing transport infrastructure maintenance contracts is the importance of addressing collaboration depth by allocating sufficient human resources to the client organisation.