Leonardus Adriana Maria van Dongen

Through-Life Engineering Services: The NedTrain Case

Investing in all operational management aspects is of great importance to the proper management and maintenance of capital assets. The primary maintenance processes are to be up to the task and to have the organization of the production plants, statements of work, planning and work preparation well in order. Continuous improvement presupposes an atmosphere where presenting improvement proposals, reporting, and removing unsafe working conditions is encouraged as a matter of course. By conducting the technical management of trains in maintenance close to the workshop floor, staff members are able to improve on the performance of the trains. Correct and proper information and the related necessary information systems allow for the analysis of performance and the implementation of improvement measures wherever required. Over the past few years, NedTrain has implemented major improvements to the performance of rolling stock in the Netherlands. Plans to perform maintenance activities closer to the transportation process and more closely attuned to dynamic maintenance demand await implementation in the near future.

Understanding maintenance decisions : how to support acquisition of capital assets

This chapter contributes with theoretical and practical insights on maintenance decision making during acquisition of capital assets. We give theoretical insights about maintenance decision making by reviewing the literature, while our practical insights come from examples of the decisions made at a maintenance organization for rolling stock: NedTrain. We find that strategic maintenance decisions are more relevant before contracting than tactical or operational decisions, and they have the largest potential to impact Life Cycle Costs. The research on strategic maintenance decisions is too broad to review individual decisions, and therefore we review papers that structure decisions in the form of frameworks. We find that according to the literature, assets and their maintenance services should be developed concurrently. However, we find in practice that NedTrain’s approach is to fit new assets into the existing maintenance services, while there are parallel continuous improvement processes for those services. From practice, we conclude that strategic maintenance decisions are not concurrent to rolling stock design decisions. We also conclude that there is a need for methods and tools to support strategic maintenance decision making during early stages of acquisition, especially before contracting.

Safety I-II, Resilience and Antifragility Engineering : A debate explained through an accident occurred on a Mobile Elevating Work Platform

Occupational health and safety (OHS) represents an important field of exploration for the research community: in spite of the growth of technological innovations, the increasing complexity of systems involves critical issues in terms of degradation of the safety levels. In such a situation, new safety management approaches are now mandatory in order to face the safety implications of the current technological evolutions. Along these lines, performing risk-based analysis alone seems not to be enough anymore. The evaluation of robustness, antifragility and resilience of a socio-technical system is now indispensable in order to face unforeseen events. This article will briefly introduce the topics of Safety I and Safety II, resilience engineering and antifragility engineering, explaining correlations, overlapping aspects and synergies. Secondly, the article will discuss the applications of those paradigms to a real accident, highlighting how they can challenge, stimulate and inspire research for improving OHS conditions.

Gamification in teaching Maintenance Engineering: a Dutch experience in the rolling stock management learning

The aim of this study is to evaluate the application of an innovative serious game, based on the asset management of rolling stock, in the training of future maintenance engineers within the master course in mechanical engineering at the University of Twente. The Logistic Support Game (LSG) is a serious game developed together with Netherlands Railways (Nederlandse Spoorwegen, NS) and Invocate (design firm) as a tool to simulate the maintenance operations of a fleet of trains. The simulation shows four perspectives: the operations manager, the asset manager, the maintenance manager and the financial manager. The three goals of this innovative training are the improvement of student engagement in the learning process, the increas of active cooperation between students with different roles in a group, and the opportunity to receive feedback on decision making. To indicate achievement of these goals, they are linked to the basic needs of learning: competence, relatedness and autonomy. A total of thirty six students played the serious game in two different sessions. At the end of each session, a survey is collected for game based learning assessment. Results suggest that the serious game has a positive impact on student engagement, cooperation, and helps transfer course contents.