RAMS data for railway infrastructure

Abstract

Having an operational database in different industries for different equipment has been a big challenge for decades for all reliability engineers and analysers.

Many different databases are introduced in order to help decision makers and many different data handbooks were published in this regards. Among the most well-known handbooks we can refer to Military Handbook-217 and OREDA. Military Handbook deals with reliability data such as failure rate of electrical components while OREDA includes reliability data of offshore equipment and systems. Railway sector is also on demand with a high assets investment. The infrastructure optimization is essential for railway companies to survive in the competitive market. RAMS management and techniques are applied in different industries in order to give the ability of forecasting the system and components behaviour during their life time period. These days RAMS analysis in railway section has become more attractive in comparison to before. Therefore many projects being started at the European level in the field of reliability engineering like as Cost, Reliability, Maintenance and Availability (CRMA,1998); Maintainability Management in European Rail Transport (REMAIN, 1998); Progression Maintenance and Management of infrastructure (ProM@in, 2003); they aremostly developing Life Cycle cost calculating methods.

We need to have a comprehensive and coherent structure for RAMS data collection and analysis process in order to consider the possible applications of RAMS techniques to the case of railway infrastructure maintenance management. In this project work data collection procedures are discussed and Pareto analysis is done on available data in Jernbaneverket.