Outsourcing Rail Maintenance Through Maintenance Contracts—A Case Study

Abstract

Rail networks are generally spread over wide geographically distant areas. It is expensive and complex for mining and other big industries to install and manage these huge network services as it needs investment in infrastructure, experts and specialised facilities to provide the services and carry out maintenance work. In such case, it is economical for the industry to outsource the maintenance services for their rail network from external agent instead of managing this services in-house. The cost to provide such services depends on the maintenance strategies to be considered during the contract period. Maintenance strategy of a rail network is developed by understanding reliability of rails used in the rail track system. Reliability analysis of rails can be carried out by understanding the failure mechanism of rail through modelling and analysis of failure data. These failure data are time or usage dependent for certain conditions. In a probabilistic sense, rail failure is a function of its usage in terms of Million Gross Tonnes (MGT) for certain conditions. This chapter provides a case study of outsourcing rail maintenance through maintenance contracts using the maintenance contract models developed in Chap. 5. This case study is to analyse real life rail industry data, deal with the limitations of available data and utilise the maintenance contract models for maintenance and replacement decisions. Parameters of the models are estimated using real world data with an application of non-homogeneous Poisson process.