An Incentive Factor-Based Dynamic Comprehensive Evaluation on a High-Speed Railway Track

Abstract

Peak management and mean management are common ways to manage the quality of high-speed railway tracks at present. The most popular method for evaluating such tracks is the track quality index (TQI) method, which can reflect the overall state of the equipment to a certain extent. However, this method is likely to ignore some potential risks that threaten the operation of a high-speed train. For more effective risk identification, an incentive factor-based dynamic comprehensive evaluation (DCE) method was introduced to assess the geometric parameters of a high-speed railway track. Moreover, the weights of geometric parameters were computed by a combination of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and entropy based on the correlation coefficient. The proposed method can highlight the sensitivity index of the geometric parameters, which is an advantage over the TQI method. A case study of a high-speed railway track was performed using the two methods, and the results were verified with the original data. It was found that the TQI method identified only one obvious risk while the proposed method identified one obvious risk and two potential risks. This suggests that the proposed method is more accurate in identifying the risky sections than the TQI method.