Maintenance of railway turnouts is a major cost driver for any infrastructure manager, which performs it based on preventive or periodic policies to guarantee minimum downtime of the infrastructure. Ballast maintenance activities, such as tamping, are scheduled by thresholding indicators derived from track geometry data in agreement with European standards. Current industrial practice adopts the same procedures for the evaluation of track geometry degradation in open track and turnouts. This lack of specificity may determine unnecessary maintenance actions with detrimental effects to the turnout dynamical performance. By employing track-side measurements of track acceleration, a probabilistic method for turnout’s ballast quality monitoring was derived by Barkhordari et al. The paper further develops such monitoring system by establishing a mapping between its output and the standard indicator of track geometry quality used by infrastructure managers to schedule ballast maintenance. This results in a predictor of track geometry quality with variable prediction horizon that is functional to the railway infrastructure manager for the predictive planning of ballast maintenance.

铁路道岔的维护是任何基础设施经理的主要成本驱动因素，其根据预防性或定期性政策执行该过程，以确保基础设施的停机时间最少。压载物的维护活动，例如夯实，是根据与欧洲标准一致的，从轨道几何数据得出的阈值指标来安排的。当前的工业实践采用相同的程序来评估开放式轨道和道岔中的轨道几何形状退化。这种缺乏特异性可能会确定不必要的维护措施，从而对道岔动力学性能产生不利影响。通过使用轨道侧的轨道加速度测量，Barkhordari等人推导出了一种用于道岔道ball质量监测的概率方法。本文通过在其输出与基础设施管理人员用于调度压载维护的轨道几何形状质量的标准指标之间建立映射关系，进一步开发了这种监视系统。这样就产生了具有可变预测范围的轨道几何质量预测器，该预测器对于铁路基础设施管理者进行压载维修的预测性计划具有功能。