Optimized reliability centered maintenance of vehicles electrical drives for high speed railway applications

The performances of railway vehicles are heavily influenced by maintenance actions, whose scheduling has to be defined taking into account cost constraints, together with system dependability targets. For this reason, starting from the choices developed during the design phase, an effective maintenance plan should be dynamically customized to system behaviour during operation. The authors present a probabilistic approach based on stochastic Petri nets in order to effectively implement a reliability centered maintenance (RCM) program, which fulfils the above mentioned requirements, and outline how such an approach utilised in jets, nuclear power generation and weapons, may be profitably used in the transportation field too.