Andreea-Camelia-Simona Bertea Undergraduate Dissertation 2017/18

A database to support visual inspection of railways assets

Supervised by F.Ciravegna

Abstract

All industries have a common denominator, assets. Whether they are buildings, equipment or resources, assets have to be inspected regularly to capture any potential defects that can lead to hazards and make decisions wisely when allocating budget for maintenance and improvement work.

This paper focuses on presenting an overview of the rail industry and the assets that fall under this specific sector. Furthermore, a database model for complex structures is discussed with potential real implementations for a better and more efficient asset management system that contains a visual inspection tool with an automated report generation functionality.

The main goal of the project is to improve the efficiency of collecting and processing data from the field back to the office, help track any defects with media capture and automatically generate a list of structures that are in need of urgent maintenance when budget becomes available. So far, asset inspections have been completed at structure level, this project is aiming to change that by introducing sub-component examinations with database support of information and media capture.