Semiautomated Railway Line Information Modeling Based on Asset Management Data

The operation and maintenance (O&M) period is a critical and resource-intensive phase of the life cycle of railway line infrastructure. The O&M of a railway line during this period requires a large amount of investment and labor. Thus, there is an urgent need for railway managers to seek more efficient management tools and methods to improve management efficiency and reduce maintenance costs. Infrastructure–building information model (I-BIM) technology, characterized by its intuitive representation and high information-integration capabilities, has gained considerable traction with infrastructure industry researchers. In the context of existing railway lines, the absence of corresponding I-BIMs or similar technology owing to the immaturity of technical development at the time led to the use of manual modeling processes, which have limitations such as high cost, slow speed, and low efficiency. This paper presents an innovative, high-speed, semiautomated method for generating I-BIMs for existing railway lines and leveraging asset management data without incurring additional data collection costs. This approach leverages key modules such as line trajectory computation, element model generation, the linking of O&M semantic information, and the visualization of asset health indexes, which can enable the swift and semiautomated creation of an O&M-oriented I-BIM for railway lines. This process elevates traditional two-dimensional database tables into more intuitive, operation-oriented, and semantically rich models. This results in the provision of more efficient support for maintenance management decisions related to railway lines. The proposed method addresses the limitations of manual modeling processes and can pave the way for enhanced O&M efficiency in the railway infrastructure sector.