Modelling of diagnostics aided RCM procedure for transportation systems. Dependability and cost evaluation

For producing high-quality mass transit systems, their performances have to be necessarily evaluated taking into account all the aspects related to the system effectiveness (functional characteristics, dependability features and other technical parameters) against the cost constraints. In particular, the preventive and corrective maintenance requirements, which highly influence both the system dependability and life cycle cost (LCC), have to be defined in order to perform only the preventive actions which are absolutely necessary and cost-effective. In this paper, the author presents a methodological approach, based on stochastic Petri nets, to quantify system dependability and cost if a diagnostics aided reliability centered maintenance (RCM) program is implemented