Locomotive’s spare parts optimization

The problem of rolling stock maintenance is critical for the railroad transport in a general way, facing the difficulties over the component´s supply in addition to recovering criterions, long order lead times, flexible demand, position of workshops and fleet diversity. The output of this scenario appears in the figure of unplanned equipment downtime greatly affecting the earnings. Locomotive´s waiting time for spares should be minimized, as well as the stock costs so, the development of mathematical model for such a system is extremely difficult. This paper focus on MRS Logistics, one of the most important railroad cargo operators in Brazil, and demonstrates the possibility of improving a locomotive maintenance system applying spare parts inventory policies. The created model can be used as a tool to ensure availability of recoverable components and total costs reduce. For validation of the calculations and developed analyzes a simulation model was constructed as an additional resource to support the decisions.