A Systems Approach to Optimizing Rail Network Greenness and Maintainability

Zhang Yanrong

Abstract

Development specialists agree that promoting green building in Asia has the potential to produce large energy savings and make polluted cities more habitable while partially mitigating the impacts of global warming. At the same time, maintainability of building has been identified as one of the key areas in which the construction industry in Singapore must achieve significant improvement. If little attention is given to the building maintainability, financial losses may be suffered by the client over the life of the building, and the asset is insufficiently used. However, very often improving greenness in a building may lead to a decrease in building maintainability thus increase the life-cycle cost of building.

The objectives identified for this study are: (1) build two separate models by using AHP method to assess the greenness and maintainability of rail network respectively, (2) combine two models to measure the overall sustainability of existing MRT networks in Singapore and observe the trend and (3) determine the trade off between greenness, maintainability and cost during the design stage of rail network. Secondary sources such as results from past dissertations, local and overseas green assessment tools are analyzed. These are supplemented by primary sources from interviews with the expert from Land Transport Authority.

Limitations of this study include the scope of study which is only limited to four MRT lines and hence could not be extended to all cases. Also only a group of expert from LTA are interviewed and hence could not represent all experts’ opinion. Lastly, the lack of quantitative data due to the sensitivity of such information makes it hard to accurately quantify the trade off between greenness, maintainability and cost.