Evolutionary Computation in Practice Evolutionary Computation in Practice

Railway track intervention planning is the process of specifying the location and time of required maintenance and renewal activities. To facilitate the process, decision support tools have been developed and typically use an expert system built with rules specified by track maintenance engineers. However, due to the complex interrelated nature of component deterioration, it is problematic for an engineer to consider all combinations of possible deterioration mechanisms using a rule based approach. To address this issue, this chapter describes an approach to the intervention planning using a variety of computational intelligence techniques. The proposed system learns rules for maintenance planning from historical data and incorporates future data to update the rules as they become available thus the performance of the system improves over time. To determine the failure type, historical deterioration patterns of sections of track are first analyzed. A Rival Penalized Competitive Learning algorithm is then used to determine possible failure types. We have devised a generalized two stage evolutionary algorithm to produce curve functions for this purpose. The approach is illustrated using an example with real data which demonstrates that the proposed methodology is suitable and effective for the task in hand.