Author(s)

V Fazio, P Firpo, M Giannettoni & S Savio

Abstract

When traditional or innovative maintenance policies are applied, the effectiveness of the actions carried out is highly influenced by the possibilities to isolate in the shortest time the faulted items. Fault isolation is directly related to the troubleshooting process adopted and obviously impacts on the time needed to carry out the maintenance actions. In transport systems, and in particular in the railway environment, the ever increasing need of providing the users with a high quality service, reducing in the meanwhile operation and support costs, makes mandatory the implementation of suitable maintenance policies supported by an effective troubleshooting process. So doing the Mean Time To Repair of the single equipment can be reduced, system availability increased and the Life Cycle Cost of the whole system decreased. In this paper the authors present a modelling procedure to simulate the troubleshooting process and to identify optimal solutions taking into account an a priori defined cost function. Such probabilistic approach is based on Monte Carlo method for generating failure occurrence times of the single items.

Keywords