Compliance of maintenance and operational needs for trains: a simulation analysis to evaluate the impact of a flexible scheduling on local transport by rail

If not properly managed neither planned on real needs, the maintenance of rolling stock may strongly affect rail operations in local public transport, risking to compromise the quality of service or generating an over sizing of the fleet. Therefore, an effective coordination is required between the Operation and Maintenance departments. Some flexibility in maintenance activities – i.e., preventive and on condition maintenance policies - has already been applied for some years in the regional rail transport with successful results; however, it has not been introduced yet in rail public transport, where a corrective maintenance is generally adopted. In this work, the proper scheduling of more flexible maintenance activities in the rail public transport context is addressed through the use of discrete event simulation. Real data sets provided by the Italian GTT-Gruppo Torinese Trasporti company have been used to test the proposed approach and to carry out a multi-scenarios campaign, aiming at analyzing the effectiveness of the maintenance process when certain operating conditions change or unexpected events occur. Some improvement proposals have also been analyzed with the proposed simulation method.