Digital Twins for Railway Infrastructure Asset Management and Maintenance

The present chapter aims to outline the potential of digital twins (DTs) to advance railway infrastructure asset management and maintenance. The chapter first discusses the major opportunities and challenges that are expected as a result of the adoption of technologies and techniques to build and operate DTs in the context of advanced railway systems. The current state of the art is then classified by three application areas, namely condition assessment and predictive maintenance, operations and maintenance management, and railway infrastructure lifecycle management. Different levels of maturity for DTs are evident for each area based on the literature findings. Building on the current status, the chapter also foresees the evolution of DTs in railway infrastructures of the future; a foresight is provided as a set of conjectures that lead to the conclusion that the creation of a network of DTs of the railway infrastructure is a viable solution; the progressive and scalable deployment of the network of DTs; and the smooth integration of humans in the loop of the DT-based decisional processes. This finally results in an augmented decision-making process applied in the complex and heterogeneous context of railway infrastructure assets.