ASSESSMENT OF THE INFLUENCE OF PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE ON THE RELIABILITY AND AVAILABILITY INDEXES OF DIESEL LOCOMOTIVES

Abstract

The article investigates the influence of preventive maintenance on the reliability and availability indexes of the railway means of transport, which also determine the economic aspects of their operation and maintenance. The research was done using the method based on fault tree analysis (FTA) and Monte Carlo simulation. The authors performed a cause and effect analysis of the occurrence of undesirable events during the operation of selected vehicles. They identified the weakest components of the rail vehicle that affect the downtime and mean availability most significantly. Specialized software including Weibull++, BlockSim,and MiniTabaided calculations were used to illustrate the application of the results of a modernization project involving a 6Dg diesel locomotive, carried out in cooperation with the biggest Polish rail carrier. The applicability of the proposed tools has been verified on the example of a selected sample of 75 diesel locomotives employing data on their use and maintenance acquired in the real operation process. The obtained results indicate that the proposedapproach can be particularly useful in practice when assessing the applied rail vehicle maintenance strategy,and while developing new strategies and selecting the best one to implement.

Keywords

• preventive maintenance
• diesel engine locomotive
• availability and reliability assessment