Structural performance model for subway networks

Abstract

The Transit Federal Administration (FTA) reported that transit use increased by 25% between 1995 and 2005 in North America. Current communities are anticipating a high quality of life where people will be able to move freely with an affordable, reliable and efficient public transit. In 2009, the FTA estimated that 15.8 billion USD is needed annually to maintain and 21.6 billion USD is needed to improve the US transit network to satisfactory conditions. Moreover, the Canadian Urban Transit Association (CUTA) estimated that 140 Billion CAD are required for maintaining, rehabilitating and replacing the subway infrastructure between 2010 and 2014. It is apparent that subway management planning is of extreme importance in order to maintain the safety of infrastructure. Subway management plans consist of assessing the structural performance of subway networks, predicting future performance, planning future maintenance and repair policies and optimizing budget allocation. Most transit authorities lack tools/models for assessing the structural performance of subway network. Therefore, the present research assists in developing the SUbway PERformance (SUPER) model, which assesses structural performance of different components in a subway network and develops performance curves of subway components, systems, lines and the entire network. The developed SUPER model performs the following steps in order to achieve the above-mentioned objectives: (1) identifies and studies network hierarchy, (2) performs structural physical, functional and integrated performance assessment at the component level, and (3) constructs performance curves at the component, line and network levels. The SUPER model uses the Analytic Hierarchy Process and Multi-Attribute Utility Theory in order to assess the integrated components performance. It also utilizes a reliability-based cumulative Weibull function to construct the performance curves of components. In addition, series/parallel system modeling .