A satellite-based framework for resilience assessment of railway embankments
Mengyi Wang (TU Delft - Civil Engineering & Geosciences)
Hongrui Wang (TU Delft - Civil Engineering & Geosciences)
Alfredo Núñez (TU Delft - Civil Engineering & Geosciences)
Bart De Schutter (TU Delft - Mechanical Engineering)
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Abstract
Understanding how railway infrastructures degrade and respond to disturbances is essential for assessing their performance and resilience over time. Such behavior can be inferred from satellite-observed deformation, which provides wide spatial coverage and frequent observations. However, translating satellite-observed deformation into quantitative resilience assessment of railway infrastructure performance remains challenging under incomplete viewing geometries and associated uncertainties. This paper proposes a satellite-based framework for assessing railway embankment resilience, using deformation patterns as observable proxies for changes in embankment-related railway performance. A reconstruction strategy integrates complementary satellite viewing geometries to recover missing observations and estimate two-dimensional deformation time series with associated uncertainties. Two deformation-based indicators relevant to resilience assessment are developed: a multi-year indicator characterizing performance stability over the full observation period, and an event-based indicator characterizing deformation changes a posteriori around independently identified disturbance events. The framework is evaluated against independent track geometry (TG) measurements in a case study. The multi-year deformation indicator shows a significant association with deterioration in the Track Quality Index. For the event-based indicator, an elevated-TG response was observed in 61.0% of alarm InSAR cases, whereas no elevated TG response was observed in 74.9% of stable InSAR cases. In this case study, these results indicate that satellite-derived deformation indicators can provide a higher-frequency complement to conventional railway embankment assessment.
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