Asset management – A brief introduction with focus on the ISO 55000 standard and mechanical deterioration of railway related assets

Report, 2021

Asset management is, with the definition in ISO 55000 the ‘coordinated activity of an organization to realize value from assets’. Here, an ‘asset’ is an ‘item, thing or entity that has potential or actual value to an organization’. This could essentially refer to all activities of an organisation related to all things that this organisation considers to be of value.
In this brief introduction we will narrow the scope significantly. Firstly, we will focus on physical assets subjected to significant mechanical deterioration – that is wear and tear. Secondly, we will focus on railway related assets. This typically relates to track and railway vehicles that need to be regularly maintained.
The introduction will discuss management of such assets in the light of the ISO 55000 series of standards. The aim is to provide an understanding of how the ability to analyse and predict mechanical deterioration can (and should) be incorporated in an asset management system.
The text is organised top–down in the sense that it sets out with an introduction to the ISO 55000 series. This overview is narrowed down to show how knowledge and predictive abilities regarding mechanical deterioration fits into asset management. It is followed by an overview of different modes of mechanical deterioration and failures, and how these can be assessed in risk analyses. A standardised and mandated way of performing risk analyses is the common safety method for risk analyses, which is described. The railway is a complex system where included components and subsystems need to interact smoothly. As discussed in chapter sec:Systems-engineering, systems engineering is an approach to achieve this. The compendium is then concluded with some brief comments on railway applications in chapter sec:Some-further-comments.