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Diss. (sammanfattning) Luleå : Luleå tekniska universitet, 2023

Railway infrastructure serves a pivotal role in fostering economic growth and poverty alleviation. Given the crucial socioeconomic significance and vast scale of railway infrastructure, ensuring its functionality and availability is paramount. Thus, an effective maintenance programme is essential to restore reliability, facilitate cost-effective restoration, and enable continued benefits. Tracks, a pivotal component of the infrastructure, undergo degradation over time due to ageing and usage, leading to deviations from designated geometry parameters. Such deviations from specified thresholds pose risks to safety and functionality, resulting in adverse effects on track availability and travel quality. Developing an effective tamping regime emerges as a vital maintenance measure to control degradation and restore track geometry to acceptable standards. An optimal maintenance schedule becomes imperative to minimise costs, enhance track availability and capacity, and ensure safety. Achieving efficient tamping scheduling requires the accurate prediction of geometry degradation, accounting for tamping effects, and modelling the evolution of single defects. However, uncontrolled shifts in geometry measurements from different inspections—known as positional errors—can misplace defects and distort their evolution analysis. Therefore, the precise alignment of geometry measurements is vital to eliminate such positional errors. The purpose of this research was to streamline maintenance scheduling by leveraging track geometry measurements for modelling and prediction.