Scheduling wheel inspection for sustainable urban rail transit operation: A Bayesian approach

Scheduling the wheel inspection is critical to ensure the safety and sustainability of urban rail transit (URT) operation. The common wheel inspection is conducted on a fixed-interval basis, determined by empirical practices. However, the relationship between the distance of wheel travel and wheel wearing condition subject to track alignment is uncertain. A Bayesian model is developed to schedule the timings of wheel inspections which meet the safety thresholds for sustainable train operation. In the case study, the historic wheel inspection data of a real-world URT line was collected and analyzed, which indicates that wheel reprofiling follows a Weibull distribution. The suggested wheel inspection plan by the proposed model is compared with fix-interval inspection. The results show that the inspection frequency can be significantly reduced before yielding 180,900 km wheel travel, which satisfies the wheel reliability as 0.95.