Abstract
Efficient asset maintenance is key for delivering services such as transport. Current rail maintenance processes have been mostly reactive with a recent shift towards exploring proactive modes. The introduction of new ubiquitous technologies and advanced data analytics facilitates the embedding of a ‘predict-and-prevent’ approach to managing assets. Successful, user-centred integration of such technology is still, however, a sparsely understood area. This study reports results from a set of interviews, based on critical decision method, with rail asset maintenance and management experts regarding current procedural aspects of asset management and maintenance. We analyse and present the results from a human-centric sensemaking timeline perspective. We found that within a complex socio-technical environment such as rail transport, asset maintenance processes apply not only just at local levels, but also at broader, strategic levels that involve different stakeholders and necessitate different levels of expertise. This is a particularly interesting aspect within maintenance that has not been discussed as of yet within a process-based and timeline-based models of asset maintenance. We argue that it is important to consider asset maintenance activities within both micro (local)- and macro (broader)-levels to ensure reliability and stability in transport services. We also propose that the traditionally distinct notions of individual, collaborative and artefact-based sensemaking are in fact all in evidence in this sensemaking context, and argue that a more holistic view of sensemaking is therefore appropriate by placing these results within an amended recognition-primed decision-making model.
Highlights
Asset management has been widely explored within different domains in industry (Vanier 2001)
Considering the subjectivity that a critical decision method (CDM) technique may pose as discussed within Methodology section, the results presented here constitute approximations of the reported case studies and incidents that aimed to identify key sensemaking and maintenance process stages including decision-making
“so I was in support team and to say what our options for accelerating this whole process what can we do and I worked with the existing upgrades team (COLL) to work through that and got into saying “but we want empirical data but we want it really quickly” (SITU) (EVAL) so whereas normally it would take weeks or months to collect the x data “how soon could we get as accurate data as possible” we looked a few options (COLL) (CUE)... looking at the data (ARTE) was the last option (EVAL) because it wasn’t that source we knew (PATT)(KNOW) and so knew we have to do work to build an interpreting data (ACT)” – [participant 3]
Summary
Asset management has been widely explored within different domains in industry (Vanier 2001). According to European Maintenance Standards (EN 13306:2001 2001), maintenance constitutes all the actions necessary during an asset’s operational lifecycle These actions can be technical, managerial or administrative and aim to either sustain, fix or replace an asset so that it is in a state to deliver its function successfully. These actions span both specific maintenance work for the assets themselves, as well as strategic approaches to ensure the appropriate work programmes, technologies and procedures are in place for reliable maintenance. A number of maintenance models have been generated that are either based on performance, empirical, theoretical, and process-based approaches in an attempt to track down maintenance processes to minimise costs and challenges. Other models are based more on processing failure modes and knock-on effects from a reliability maintenance perspective (e.g. Braaksma et al 2013)
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