Creating Value by Integrating Logistic Trains Services and Maintenance Activities

NedTrain is the Netherlands Railway's subsidiary responsible for rolling stock maintenance. Train sets are brought in for short-term routine maintenance after set intervals of some 75 to 120 days. When a major defect occurs, train sets are allocated to one of the three maintenance depots and are diagnosed and repaired. Removal from active service causes large amounts of withdrawal of trains. In the traditional production concept, major defects could not be repaired on spot by the service organization. A lack of knowledge and equipment forced the National Fleet Control Centre to send the trains to the maintenance depots. This led to the insight that an upgrade of the service process could lead to a substantial improvement of the availability of the fleet. NedTrain re-modelled the traditional production concept and decided to invest 25 million euros in 4 additional Technical Centres, strategically placed on major nodes in the train service operations. In these new Centres, major defects are repaired during the night. Also, the routing of empty trains to the depots is prevented. The Utrecht Technical Centre was opened in Spring 2014; the other Centres will start operations shortly. This investment will lead to an improvement of the fleet availability by over thirty cars (worth 60 million euros), savings that can be cashed in the next round of ordering rolling stock. This paper describes both the preparation of the service processes and the first results, measured in the Utrecht-case

Performance Centered Maintenance as a Core Policy in Strategic Maintenance Control

Rolling stock maintenance in the Netherlands traditionally is performed on several levels of complexity and therefore on levels of non-availability and cost. The challenge in optimizing performance and cost of rolling stock maintenance is to integrate the policy on maintenance concepts, maintenance locations and maintenance intervals (what, when & where). NedTrain as a subsidiary of the Netherlands Railways is developing and implementing this improved concept of maintenance. On one hand maintenance concepts are being improved based on the philosophy of Risk Based Maintenance, with customer demands on risks regarding safety, reliability, availability and cost as a basis for maintenance renewal. On the other hand - during analysis of current maintenance concepts and risk based improvements – modularization of maintenance tasks is taken into account leading to possibilities to perform these tasks on a lower complexity level, during natural non-availability moments of train sets (off-peak hours in daytime or at night) in local depots instead of larger workshops. With this maintenance policy “Performance Centered Maintenance”, performance improvements and cost reduction are being achieved. New strategies arise for investments in depots, train equipment (e.g. Real Time Monitoring) and training of mechanics.In this document a general overview and first results will be given of the approach

A Multi-domain Approach Toward Adaptations of Socio-technical Systems:The Dutch Railway Case-Part 1

Socio-technical systems are highly complex in which a number of domains each of which including numerous interdependent elements are present. Therefore, for adaptation of sociotechnical systems, Part 1 of this paper presented a multi-domain approach based upon Design Structure and Multi-domain matrices to develop/analyze a multi-domain model of those system. Moreover, that model is analyzed according to both (1) the change propagation measures of the non-human domain and (2) the information processing view of the stakeholder domain of the socio-technical system. This papers presents application of the presented method in the Dutch railway system. We have reviewed the relevant railway literature, and interviewed with a number of the Dutch railway experts and validated our model. The results are presented in this paper.</p