
Adapting Urban Rail Infrastructure to Climate Change
For urban planning, it is important to investigate “How climate changes might affect the future investment plans for construction, operation and maintenance for urban railway networks to ensure urban sustainable developments?” and “What will be the required policies and actions in design, construction, operation and maintenance to ensure robust and resilient operation to adapt with climate changes for short-and long-term scenarios?”, and “What are the expected challenges related business and governance for climate adaptation of built environment?”.
The aim of the project is to improve the resilience of urban railway infrastructure from adverse future climate conditions by implementing climate adaptation strategy in design, construction, operation, and maintenance. The aim will be achieved by developing a solution that integrates urban railway infrastructure features with climate change models and Satellite images and climate data. There is also a need to utilize new technologies, e.g., digitalization, and AI and satellite technologies to support urban planner and transport administration agencies to identify and implement required adaption planning for urban railway infrastructure.
This project addresses the following short-term targets:
- Better understanding of the climatic impact mechanism, causal relationship and trend projection of climate change for urban railway network.
- Developing resilient solution for urban railway infrastructure by integrating climate change model and satellite data in operation and maintenance plan.
- Developing cost benefit analyses for urban railway climate adaptation.
- Climate change risk and vulnerability analyses for urban railway network.
- Scale up the project and build project consortium internationally by collaborating with different countries and stakeholders to attract funding from EUs framework, Horizon Europe, etc.
The long-term effect of the project outcomes are:
- Facilitate awareness of climate change impacts and integrate developed solutions to facilitate finance and business models,
- Strengthen the research in sustainable built envir. at national and EU level,
- Strengthen collaboration among various urban planner, transport experts, and communities interested climate change impacts on citizen life,
- Improve the resilience of urban railway networks by climate adaptation.
- Facilitate modification and development of national policies and regulation.
The methodology implemented in the project can have significant impacts of more than 10% reduction in disruptions due to climate and 5-10 % operation and maintenance costs due to the early alarm system (exc. the second-hand societal cost).
Innovation potential
The project will develop an innovative platform and process that addresses to reduce impact of climate change on urban railway network (techniques, products and process in disruptive innovation).
The project will also deal with the incremental innovations to the
- existing infrastructure and construction strategies for urban railway network (infrastructure & production systems),
- rethinking of planning for future investments for implementation for climate adaptation (Business model / Value model) and
- revisiting the planning for change in policies and regulations (Policy & regulations)
WP1: Project management
This WP consist of the project management, internal and external follow-ups, coordination of tasks, alignment of outcomes, and the establishment of a proper quality system ensures the objectives of the project will be achieved.
WP2: Data collection and pre-processing
This WP deals with collecting of different data such as maintenance data of railway infrastructure, railway station, and drainage system and metrological data need to be collected for three case studies since 2000. In addition, Interviews and questionnaires will be distributed to the experts and society. Overall, we will follow Living Lab approach for data collection, experimentation, and evaluation of this solution.
WP3: Climate change and extreme weather events for urban infrastructure
This WP aims to describe climate change impact relevant for urban railway systems. SMHI investigates internal variability in multi-decadal temperature and precipitation trends. Two scenarios can be designed as short and long term, for instance, 2020-2049 and 2071- 2100.
WP4: Condition Assessment method for deformations
Adapt InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) technique for railroad infrastructure to detect deformations continuously using radar images captured by orbiting satellites. But also, how deformation over a larger area affect the railroad and how it can be detected by other data capture methods using LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System).
WP5: Climate change induced changes in structural behaviour due to changes in snow loads
The scope of this WP is to measure and assess the impact of changes in snow falls on existing structures. The plan is to measure the snow loads on roofs, compare it with existing prescriptions and use the data to evaluate the impact on the structural behaviour. The data can be further used to generate predictive models for structural performance by integrating it in a digital twin of the structure.
WP6: Integrated method for assessing climate risk and adaptation measures
Integrated method for assessing climate adaptation for Railways is being implemented based on Adaptive Evaluation Framework (AEF). Reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety (RAMS) analyses will be dynamically performed based on the climate modelling scenarios, cost benefit analyses and LCC to enrich the alert information. Vulnerability analysis also being carried addressing sustainable and effective climate risk reduction and management.
WP7: Alert Management System (AMS) for urban railway infrastructure
The main outcome of this WP is to design an AI-based AMS for climate impact assessments and anomaly detection. The current AMS are deterministic rule-based however by increasing the number of impacts and demands for a higher level of availability while not sacrificing safety, it is required to define thresholds and parameters to automatically deduce from infrastructure condition.
WP8: Communication, dissemination, and competence building
The main goal of this WP is to ensure effective collaboration for sustainable competence building in our society through knowledge sharing and exchange of training/education materials within the quadruple helix. Results and outcomes of this multidisciplinary research project will be communicated via organizing workshops, and webinars, and on the project homepage.
The following partners are involved in this project:
- LTU (Operation and Maintenance Engineering, Structural Engineering, and Digital Service and Systems)
- Trafikverket
- JVTC
- WSP
- Infranord
- SMHI
- Trafikförvaltningen,Region Stockholm
- Bnear IT
- The Arctic University, Norway (UiT)
- University of Aberdeen (UA), UK
Results
Publication journal:
- Life cycle cost assessment of railways infrastructure asset under climate change impacts
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- Climate change impacts assessment on railway infrastructure in urban environments
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- Assessing climate-induced risks to urban railway infrastructure
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- Adapting to climate change: snow load assessment of snow galleries
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- LCC-based approach for design and requirement specification for railway track system
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Peer-reviewed International Conference Publications
- A.H.S Garmabaki, Masoud Naseri, Javad Barabadi, Impact analysis of climate change on rail infrastructure for adaptation planning: A Swedish railway infrastructure use-case, Arctic Science Summit Week 2023, Vienna, Austria from 17 - 24 February 2023.
- A.H.S Garmabaki, Masoud Naseri, Johan Odelius, Gustav Strandberg, Javad Barabadi, Risk assessment of climate change on Railway infrastructure asset, Industrial AI Conference 2023 - IAI 2023, 13-16 Jun 2023,Risk Assessment of Climate Change Impacts on Railway Infrastructure Asset | SpringerLink
External link.
- Ahmad Kasraei, A.H.S Garmabaki, Johan Odelius, Uday Kumar Climate change and its weather hazard on the reliability of railway infrastructure, 33rd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2023).P044-cd.dvi (rpsonline.com.sg)
External link.
- Veronica Jägare, Ulla Juntti, A.H.S Garmabaki, System innovation challenges for climate adaptation, Industrial AI Conference 2023 - IAI 2023, 13-16 Jun 2023, System Innovation Challenges for Climate Adaptation | SpringerLink
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- Ahmad Kasraei, A.H.S Garmabaki, Johan Odelius, Uday Kumar Machine learning for railway asset clustering: The effects of engineering, geographical, and climate change parameters, Industrial AI Conference 2023 - IAI 2023, 13-16 Jun 2023,Climate Zone Reliability Analysis of Railway Assets | SpringerLink
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- Khosro Soleimani Chamkhorami, Ahmad Kasraei, A.H.S Garmabaki, Johan Odelius, and Aghil Esmaeili Kelishomi, Integrating climate measures with life cycle cost assessment utilizing machine learning techniques, Industrial AI Conference 2023 - IAI 2023, 13-16 Jun 2023, Under review,
- Khosro Soleimani Chamkhorami, Ahmad Kasraei, A.H.S Garmabaki, Stephen Mayowa Famurewa, Uday Kumar, Johan Odelius, Implications of Climate Change in Life Cycle Cost Analysis of Railway Infrastructure, 33rd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2023), P093-cd.dvi (rpsonline.com.sg)
External link.
- A.H.S Garmabaki; Stephen Famurewa; Adithya Thaduri; Uday Kumar; Johan Odelius, Gustav Strandberg, Climate change impacts assessment on railway maintenance, Proceedings of the 32nd European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL 2022),Edited by Maria Chiara Leva, Edoardo Patelli, Luca Podofillini, and Simon Wilson, doi: 10.3850/978-981-18-5183-4_S25-01-126-cd, Singapore, S25-01-126-cd.dvi (diva-portal.org)
External link.
Contact
Amir Garmabaki
- Associate Professor
- 0920-493429
- amir.garmabaki@ltu.se
- Amir Garmabaki
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