Digital Twins for Condition Assessment of Railway Infrastructures

The railway infrastructure includes vital assets that serve economic and social functions, such as bridges, tunnels, embankments, and rail tracks. These structures are subjected to deterioration processes; therefore, their structural performance tends to decay over time, contributing to risk events occurrence, such as component failure. Thus, the integrity management and condition assessment of railway infrastructure is crucial, requiring preventive operations to achieve the asset expected life-cycle. Digital transformation and new technological advances can significantly improve the inspection, monitoring, and maintenance of railway infrastructure, reducing management and maintenance costs, improving system availability, and reducing operational losses. In this context, digital twins (DTs) are a further step in the modeling development and management of critical assets. The use of DTs associated with recent technological developments provides a way to employ data-driven approaches by storing and managing data from the past and current state of the assets. Additionally, a DT can grant subsidies for decision-making and process prioritization for railway infrastructure, allowing total cost reduction and increased safety. Focusing on the innovation that digital twins can bring to the field of study and their multidisciplinary aspect, this chapter presents an overview of their application for integrity management and condition assessment of railway infrastructures.