Reliability Centered Maintenance for rolling stock: A case study in coaches’ wheel sets of passenger trains of Iranian railway

Historically, most of the maintenance tasks in rolling stock companies are devoted to Preventive Maintenance which leads to some problems such as erroneous maintenance work, unnecessary maintenance tasks, etc. Therefore, it is essential to develop effective maintenance strategies to deal with these problems. While the safety is a significant factor in rolling stock industries, the most well known and widely applied maintenance optimization strategy is so called Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). The aim of this paper is to discuss the implementation of RCM to make maintenance of rolling stock of the Raja Passenger Train Corporation more cost effective. Therefore, the paper presents RCM implementation for the wheel sets which is the most critical subsystem from the rolling stocks reliability point of view. Finally, it recommends a modified maintenance plan which is able to improve the maintenance productivity by decreasing downtimes of passenger coaches.