ABSTRACT
Nowadays the RAMS process is very well described in EN50126 by “V Diagram” regarding which activities is necessary in railways life cycle phases. Nevertheless, it is not clear which are the specific reliability engineer and risk analysis methods must be applied in order to achieve high performance a long railways life cycle. The methodology described on EN50126 does not consider explicitly for example reliability engineer methods like accelerated test, growth analysis, Life cycle analysis, RAM analysis by Monte Carlo Simulation a long enterprises life cycle.
In many cases, the train industry carry on RAMS and life Cycle Cost to manage their asset but do not optimize the reliability engineer methods to get better results. The equipment life cycle analysis, RAM analysis, Accelerated test, Reliability Growth Analysis, DFMEA, FMECA, RCM and Human reliability analyze are not applied intensively and correctly a long train life cycles to obtain better results. The main objective of this paper is to show advantages on such methods application and how such application can be applied to improve the supplier reliability requirements, the warranty requirement for customer and life cycle cost results.
In order to improve RAM process in Railways industry this paper will discuss the RAMS process gaps and propose improvement based on a train project RAMS analysis case example in order to have more efficient Asset Management by RAMs process to achieve better results.
Thus, regarding different lifecycle phases will be discussed which the best practices to cover such gap. That means which are the gaps on design phase and which are the proposals to improve that using Accelerated Test, Reliability Growth Analysis and DFMEA as well as risk analysis methods. On Basic project phase there are also some gaps that can be improved by life cycle analysis, FMEA, RCM, RAM Analysis, and on construction phase how human reliability can be applied to avoid human error. In addition such methods can be carried on in also in operational phases in order to keep system high performance.
