Digital documentation of railway tunnel inspection in Austria

Infrastructure, especially railway tunnels, require continuous inspection to ensure their safety. Furthermore, the detection of damages at an early stage can improve their service life. These tasks represent a major challenge for those involved and the tunnel down time is a disruption in operation. In rail networks, comprehensive preparations are necessary to be able to plan closures and required compensation measures. To optimize this process, a workflow for a digital inspection was generated to allow a rapid localization and a corresponding time advantage when conducting the activities on site. In doing so, a multitude of bases can be used, a standardization of damage patterns is carried out and a collaborative cooperation of multiple inspection personnel is possible. Depending on the data stock, digitized as-built models in the form of a plan, digital plan documents and existing or generated digital twins can be used. Making it possible to locate a damage already during the inspection and thus enable a comprehensible documentation and an automated generation of reports. The pre-set options for attribution of damages enables a time-optimized inspection on site—which enables a reduction of the required time, the associated restrictions on traffic routing and at the same time reduces the susceptibility to errors. Within this paper, results of a first series of field tests along the Tauern Line of ÖBB, using a digital inspection workflow, are presented.