Maintainability improvement using allocation methods for railway systems

An optimal maintenance policy is an essential condition of many industrial products in terms of saving resources and minimising operational costs and system downtime. Some maintenance actions (e.g. corrective maintenance, preventive maintenance, and condition-based maintenance) are illustrated in the first part of this article. The article focuses on maintainability allocation techniques. Four procedures are analysed (the failure rate-based allocation method; the trade-off of failure rate and design feature-based allocation method; fuzzy maintainability allocation based on interval analysis; and the time characteristic-based MA model). Traditional procedures are characterised by several drawbacks; therefore, attention is given to the time characteristics-based method, which turned out to be the best and the most complete procedure because it does not have the limitations of the other methods. The last part of the article proposes a case study analysed using the techniques implemented in the maintainability allocation optimal method. Two different cases are studied. They differ in the mean time to repair objective. Initially, the requirement could vary inside a range, then, it is fixed to the value of six hours.