ABSTRACT

Not only the complexity of the railway rolling stock systems has increased over the last years and decades, but also the requirements on their dependability and performance. The long life cycle of railway rolling stock imposes additional challenges on maintenance engineering and on monitoring the system performance during the life cycle of the system. The chapter proposes a framework for managing reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) along the railway rolling stock life cycle. The framework integrates the points of view of the different stakeholders involved over the entire life cycle. Approaches for several phases of the life cycle are elaborated with the focus on concept and definition phase, design and development, and operation and maintenance. This includes defining RAM/life cycle cost (LCC) requirements and their apportionment to subsystems and determining, influencing, and demonstrating RAM and LCC parameters in practice. An increasingly important part is the integration of RAM/LCC requirements in contracts. The conflicting goals between reduction of design and development costs, maintenance costs, availability, and reliability are discussed and solutions are proposed. Additionally, maintenance engineering, including the definition of maintenance tasks and the respective maintenance intervals is introduced within the framework. The main contribution of the chapter is its integral character combining different approaches along the entire life cycle.