Wie fraktal ist die Eisenbahn?

One of the main challenges in railway asset management is the analysis of vertical track geometry in order to execute a condition-based maintenance strategy. Beyond the currently used approaches, studies to improve wavelength analyses on track geometry have been carried out in order to distinguish the cause of defects. Since the 1980's, attempts have been made to establish the power spectral density analysis for this purpose. However, due to the complexity of result interpreta-tion and computeraided calculation it was not implemented as a standard in track geometry analyses. The fractal analysis enables to evaluate track geometry data due to different wave length characteristics and their effects on track. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]