Climate Adaptation and Risk Mitigation of Swedish Railway Infrastructure (AdaptRail)

Abstract:Future transport infrastructure will be more interconnected and complex and thus more vulnerable to the natural hazards due to climate change such as higher sea levels, floods, landslide, high temperatures and heat waves, and more extreme weather events, leading to huge financial and environmental loss .

In Swedish railway infrastructure, weather-related failures in switches and crossings (S&C) cause about 50% of train delays, where winter maintenance of switches and crossings costs on average 300MSEK annually.The aim of the project is to improve the resilience of the railway infrastructure from adverse weather conditions by implementing climate adaptation strategy in design, operation, and maintenance.

This requires new decision support system for infrastructure management where models for climate change are integrated.

Such an integration can be achieved by employing AI-based tools and techniques for leveraging the climate change data, and meteorological data as well as the operation and maintenance data of rail infrastructure.

By achieving this goal, AdaptRail project contributes to creating new pathways towards design, operation, and maintenance of climate-resilient rail infrastructure.

It is expected that this project contributes about 8-10% reduction in disruptions and 5-10 % decrease in operation and maintenance costs by providing an smart alert management system. Keywords: Climate change, Climate adaptation, AI, Machine Learning, Railway infrastructure