Condition-Based Maintenance of HVAC on a High-Speed Train for Fault Detection

Lorenzo Ciani, Giulia Guidi, Gabriele Patrizi, Diego Galar

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)
3 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a well-established method for preventive maintenance planning. This paper focuses on the optimization of a maintenance plan for an HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) system located on high-speed trains. The first steps of the RCM procedure help in identifying the most critical items of the system in terms of safety and availability by means of a failure modes and effects analysis. Then, RMC proposes the optimal maintenance tasks for each item making up the system. However, the decision-making diagram that leads to the maintenance choice is extremely generic, with a consequent high subjectivity in the task selection. This paper proposes a new fuzzy-based decision-making diagram to minimize the subjectivity of the task choice and preserve the cost-efficiency of the procedure. It uses a case from the railway industry to illustrate the suggested approach, but the procedure could be easily applied to different industrial and technological fields. The results of the proposed fuzzy approach highlight the importance of an accurate diagnostics (with an overall 86% of the task as diagnostic-based maintenance) and condition monitoring strategy (covering 54% of the tasks) to optimize the maintenance plan and to minimize the system availability. The findings show that the framework strongly mitigates the issues related to the classical RCM procedure, notably the high subjectivity of experts. It lays the groundwork for a general fuzzy-based reliability-centered maintenance method.
Original languageEnglish
Article number1418
Pages (from-to)1418
Number of pages1
JournalElectronics
Volume10
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12 Jun 2021

Keywords

  • Condition-based maintenance
  • Fault detection
  • Fuzzy logic
  • Reliability
  • Reliability-centered maintenance
  • Railway

Project and Funding Information

  • Funding Info
  • This research received no external funding

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