L.A.M. van Dongen

Operation, safety and human: Critical factors for the success of railway transportation

This paper focuses on three categories of performance indicators for railway transportation: the excellence of operation, system safety and human factors. These are among the most critical indicators for delivering high quality services. This paper discusses the main issues, challenges and future directions of public transportation on these themes.

On the Initial Spare Parts Assortment for Capital Assets: A Structured Approach Aiding Initial Spare Parts Assortment Decision-Making (SAISAD)

In the capital-intensive industry, maintenance expenditures can add up to several times the initial investment. In order to be competitive in their business, owners and users of these capital goods have to take into account the total life cycle cost at investment (e.g. the lifespan of a capital is often more than several decades), the renewal decisions for their installations and the logistic management of the spare parts. Erroneous or unstructured initial spare parts assortment decision-making part of the logistic management can lead to undesired downtime and increases the risk of obsolete or unavailable components. Decision making is complicated by non-existent data in the early design phase and several information management problems. Based on a case study at Netherlands Railways (the largest maintainer of rolling stock in the Netherlands) and literature review a Decision Support Model to structure and improve the data gathering for more effective initial spare part assortment decision making is proposed.

Beyond RAMS Design : Towards an Integral Asset and Process Approach

The lifespan to which assets can be efficiently maintained, upgraded or disposed, heavily depends on the characteristics designed into the asset in the design phase. RAMS analysis is a well-established approach often used to reach this target. This approach is however not adequate for handling the complexity of changes and demands placed on nowadays assets. This can lead to reduced performance and unnecessary risk taking. There is a need for a more integral RAMS(SHEEP) perspective including Supportability, Health, Environment, Economics and Politics. Additionally there is often only focused on the asset itself and not on processes supporting the maintenance of an asset. Therefore this chapter does not only give a historic overview on RAMS evolvement, but also aims at answering how the supporting processes can be designed from an integral RAMSSHEEP perspective. We illustrate this by analysing the functional requirements for the Toilet System (TS) of the Sprinter Light Train (SLT).

Exploiting Life Cycle Innovation

Life cycle innovation is achieved by continuous technology insertion in each stage of the life cycle. For capital assets, opportunities for innovation are produced through integration, collaboration and long term partnerships. Such opportunities arise in the acquisition phase, and the client must balance product, process and supply chain decisions. To understand what is missing in the innovation chain, we present a novel life cycle model relating products and capital assets. We then provide a framework that exposes links between the asset and maintenance architectures. We believe both to be fundamental contributions for reducing uncertainty, helping collaboration in complex projects.