System management for remote condition monitoring in railway systems

Condition Monitoring is an useful technique employed in railways because it is possible to study any condition of the machinery in remote locations. In this paper, a fault tree analysis (FTA) is presented as a qualitative method for studying the state of the critical components of the railway infrastructure as a system considering to its different subsystems. The quantitative analysis of the FTA is done by Binary Diagram Decision (BDD). The size of the BDD generated by the transformation from FTA to BDD will depend of the ordering of the FTA events. In this work it has been employed the “Top-down-left-right”, “AND”, “The depth first search”, “breadth-first search” and “The level” methods for listing the events. Finally, a classification of the events is done based on their importance measures. The importance measures have been calculated by the Birnbaum, Critically Structural and Fussell-Vesely heuristic approaches. A comparative analysis is done and the main results are presented employing a turnout as case study.