Reliability Analysis of the Rolling Stock Industry: A Case Study

Provision of reliable rolling stock and infrastructure equipment is an important part in achieving high levels of safety. Therefore, the railway industry uses different methods and tools to improve the performance of different subsystems in order to ensure safety and reliability, which are the important factors for passengers and cargo transportation. Hence, reliability analysis is required to identify the bottlenecks in the system and find the components or subsystems with low reliability for a desired level of performance. This paper focuses on collection and analysis of field failure data over a period in Raja Passenger Train Company of Iran. The results of data analysis show that wheel sets is the bottleneck, and it utilizes the historical data of wheel sets to determine the reliability function. Thereafter, the reliability of each type of wheel sets are identified over different time intervals and which can be used to determine the appropriate time of preventive maintenance tasks.