Data acquisition, transmission, collection and analysis for a fleet of railway vehicles in search of diagnostic rules for CBM

This paper presents a roadmap for a Company that manages a fleet of vehicles (or machineries) towards the Condition Based Maintenance that is, in principle, the most efficient maintenance policy. The paper associates to each maintenance policy its benefits and its requirements in terms of infrastructure and costs. Using the proposed roadmap, a Company can decide its strategy and can schedule the investments in terms of technologies and skills. Bombardier Transportation Italy started this roadmap few years ago, for moving from a reactive maintenance policy to a proactive policy where some key indicators are measured and monitored to optimize (and reduce) the maintenance interventions. The paper presents the first results achieved by means of an analytical tool developed together with the Dept. DITEN of the University of Genoa applied to the fleet of Bombardier locomotives in Europe. Two examples of statistical analysis on the data collected from the fleet of vehicles of Bombardier in Europe show how even very simple analytics may lead to important technological and economical results.