Development of a decision support tool to determine the state of train wagons in Sri Lanka railways

Abstract

Different countries use different models to condemn railway wagons once they reach the end of their service life. However, in Sri Lanka, such transparent method is not being used. The method currently practiced mainly depends on the experience of the assessors. The Sri Lanka Railway (SLR) has 53 types wagons in its rolling stock and wrong decisions to condemn wagons can lead to considerable loss to the SLR and country’s economy in general. Therefore, this study focused on developing a decision supporting mechanism to condemn the train wagons in SLR by assessing their status using a well-defined and transparent mechanism. The objectives were to study the existing procedures for valuation and condemning process of BCGS in SLR, to develop a decision support mechanism to condemn BCGS and analyse the scrap value in a transparent manner, and to evaluate the mechanism. Data were collected using documents, and surveys, interviews and focus group discussions with relevant 18 employees in the SLR. Then, the decision support mechanism was developed based on Microsoft excel. Finally, it was evaluated by letting 3 evaluators to assess the status of two wagons of different conditions using the existing and the proposed mechanisms. The proposed decision support mechanism showed consistency compared to the current method. Extension of the developed method to encompass other types of units in the rolling stock is proposed as future work.