Study level

  • PhD
  • Master of Philosophy
  • Honours

Faculty/School

Faculty of Engineering

School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering

Topic status

We're looking for students to study this topic.

Research centre

Supervisors

Associate Professor Michael Cholette
Position
Associate Professor
Division / Faculty
Faculty of Engineering
Dr Huy Truong-Ba
Position
Senior Research Fellow
Division / Faculty
Faculty of Engineering

Overview

Effective maintenance of railway infrastructure is crucial for safe and comfortable transportation. Rail maintainers currently use a combination of time-based (scheduled) and condition-based approaches to balance the costs and benefits of inspections and maintenance.

This project aims to enable advanced maintenance by advanced analysis of degradation patterns, establishment of new predictive models, and development of novel inspection and maintenance optimisation methods to efficiently allocate resources.

Research activities

In this project you will:

  • review methods applied to rail surface defect modelling and track geometry degradation
  • carry out statistical analysis of degradation data
  • use machine learning to assess degradation patterns and impacts of maintenance
  • implementat=existing analysis techniques
  • develop new degradation models and maintenance planning methods.

Outcomes

The outcomes of this project are:

  • development of software for data analysis and degradation prediction
  • new mathematical models for predictive maintenance.

Skills and experience

You must have:

  • familiarity (or willingness to learn) Python.

It is also highly desired that you have:

  • capability in programming
  • skills in statistics
  • skills in machine learning

Scholarships

You may be eligible to apply for a research scholarship.

Explore our research scholarships

Keywords

Contact

Contact the supervisor for more information.