TSAG’s focus is primarily on solutions relating to the technical causes. This price, which increases as spare capacity is used up, includes delay compensation payments, lost revenue from reduced demand, additional resources procured and maintained (eg for spare cover) and the people and administration associated with all of these. As an indication of scale for the first of these, payments within the industry for delay (calibrated to reflect its commercial value) are £600 million pa. Significant sums are associated with the reliability of structural assets in the face of climate change – eg our estimate of the combined business interruption and material damage costs due to flooding, unless adaptive action is taken, is in the range £1-3 billion over the next thirty years.

At present, much railway technology is bespoke and therefore expensive. A key driver to significant performance improvement and cost reduction is developing the ability to adopt appropriately standardised, high quality, low cost technology that is commercially available from competitive markets.

There are large potential benefits from a whole-system approach to reliability. Better understanding of how assets perform leads to better design (with lower maintenance costs). Improved understanding of interactions between sub-systems (eg track/train), allows optimisation of track and train specifications, reduced maintenance and better performance. Inventory costs can be reduced by simplification in the range of assets. Productivity improvements come from reduced complexity, greater staff familiarity with the use and maintenance of equipment, the use of effective asset control/information systems and flexibility in operations.

However, delivering these benefits is hampered by asset information being stored in systems which are often difficult to access and use in an integrated way. There isno common model or approach that seeks to serve the whole industry. Updating the information can be laborious and expensive. The whole-system approach seeks to overcome these kinds of problems.

Progress and initial insights TSAG has focused on developing a whole-industry approach to asset management, although this is still at an early stage. We have initiated work towards delivering whole-system reliability and the use of commercial off-theshelf (COTS) assets. Knowledge of asset condition is key to reliability anagement. Therefore initial work focused on remote condition monitoring (RCM) which allows prediction of asset failure and timely intervention (and informs decisions on intervention strategies). It concluded that a straightforward RCM system could reduce train delays by up to 12%. But to transform the data into information that could be used by maintainers would require the adoption of train locator/identification systems, a future-proof, low cost data transmission capacity and common information and data storage standards.

TSAG’s Reliability Steering Group has launched two projects to make the business case for a whole system approach to reliability and to understand better the underlying relationships:

• Building the evidence for a whole system, strategic approach to reliability This work will provide an evidence based case for the development of:
  - A joined-up, system-wide approach to reliability in the medium/long-term
  - An operations reliability work stream
  - A reliability programme over several years in order to embed continuous reliability improvement into the industry in a similar way to safety
• Reliability modelling
  This work seeks to understand the relationships between reliability, cost and capacity. It will run scenarios and consider trade-offs, to answer such questions as:
  - If system capacity doubles over the next 30
  years, what level of reliability will be required?
  - What will the cost of unreliability be in the future?
  - What does a 99.9% reliable system look like?

A TSAG sponsored project, co-funded by RSSB and Network Railis examining how the railway can adapt to climate change. Led by Network Rail, it will provide information, on a route basis, of the likely effects of climate on asset performance and safety. It will help predict asset and system behaviour for the next 50 years and the formulation of a plan for an affordable and cost-effective weatherproofing programme over a 20-year period.

There have been other industry initiatives to capture,manage and share asset knowledge to improve reliability management– eg the cross-functional Fleet Challenge, which seeks to raise PPM by 1% in CP5 (2014-19) through train fleet performance improvements, and the Network Rail led Intelligent Infrastructure project. Network Rail has proposed the development of a formal, co-ordinated asset management planning activity for the rail industry, linked to industry planning processes and regulatory control timescales. The scope would extend to shipper systems as well as traffic management, infrastructure and vehicle systems. The cross-industry integrated approach would provide a structure to baseline and generate proposals to improve processes through stakeholder engagement/contribution – creating consensus where this is currently often lacking.

Asset management prizes are often greatest at system interfaces, as shown by the cost reductions and better informed procurement stemming from the application of VTISM (Vehicle Track Interaction Strategic Model). In cooperation with the industry’s System Interface Committees, we will evaluate the potential for other such optimisation tools and the development of the next generation VTISM.