Availability Estimation and Maintenance Optimization for Transportations systems

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Govindarajulu Eedara

Abstract

The system performance depends on the availability, efficiency of maintenance and operating conditions. The industrial systems are designed, manufactured and tested/simulated under laboratory/ideal conditions. But the conditions in which the systems are working in real-time industries/companies are different.  Due to this, the components of each system will fail well before the schedule given by the company even though the periodic maintenance is carried out as per the manufacturer's standard operating procedures (SOP). The complexity of the system will increase the failure probability and these failures will affect the performance of the system. Therefore, it is important to know the critical components of the system. In this paper, a methodology has been applied to identify the bottlenecks in the fleet as the availability estimation. Optimum maintenance intervals are calculated for each variety of systems based on the minimization of downtime.


The presented methodology is applied to on-road vehicles in Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation (APSRTC) as a case study. The transmission subsystem is identified as a bottleneck in transportation vehicles, availabilities and optimum maintenance intervals are estimated for TVG SML SL and EXP type buses.

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