Enhancements of reliability centered maintenance analysis and its application to the railway industry

Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is a mature technique for effective maintenance decision making in complex systems. Although RCM is widely used in industry, there are major limiting factors that prevent its wider application such as the lack of reliability data at the beginning of the system operating life, the inaccuracy of the supplier data, the focus of the analysis on the failure modes rather than on the component and the fact that economic considerations do not enter the RCM process. We propose an approach to address all these issues, based on the integration of RCM with system Life Cycle Cost (LCC) models. This allows factoring a cost-benefit analysis into the technical considerations, thus yielding the optimal final maintenance decision. A practical example from ALSTOM is shown, in which, for confidentiality, the model parameter values have been opportunely modified.