Improving the rail industry's Vehicle-Track Interaction Strategic Model (VTISM) to include wheelset management modelling

Effective asset management planning is a core requirement for an infrastructure provider that spends £billions on asset maintenance and renewal every year. Asset Management decision-support tools are playing a key role within the Rail Industry providing support to the asset management planning functions. Over the past 10 years the industry has been committed to a program of research and development relating to a decision-support tool known as the 'Vehicle Track Interaction Strategic Model' (VTISM). The vision for VTISM is to provide the rail industry with a decision-support tool for calculating the whole-life, whole-system costs associated with the vehicle-track interface. Before the development of VTISM, the tools available to the rail industry did not allow it to adequately address key questions associated with wheel/rail interface whole-life costs. This paper discusses the development of the Wheelset Management Model (WMM) decision-support tool which provides VTISM with an enhanced capability to model the impact of changes on wheelset related maintenance and renewal costs, thus allowing the optimisation of asset management plans. Wheelset maintainers and manufacturers, Rail Regulators, Government, Rail Operators and Network Rail are the intended users of the model.