Evaluation Model of Availability for Transport Fleet Systems

A transport fleet system is a set of similar units or assets generally associated with some type of vehicle to meet a transportation need. This system is frequently used in massive passenger and heavy cargo transport inside and outside cities. Operational availability is a measure that estimates the time during which a unit can fulfill its function. In the case of transport fleets, high availability rates are required to guarantee optimal service. Therefore, the maintenance system plays a crucial role in ensuring such availability. Because of this, there is a need to design tools to improve the operational availability rate for this type of system. This article proposes an evaluation model of the availability rate for a transport fleet with routing in the presence of a maintenance system that applies various maintenance policies helping to identify which ones are best adapted to changes in service demand and fleet size. This model has been developed using a hierarchy of Colored Petri Nets (CPN) simulated in the free software CPNTools. Finally, a case study is shown to observe the model's usefulness.