How to Reduce the Life Cycle Cost of Rolling Stocks
Because of the shortage of the young age workers, an alteration of the work style and a reduction of the birthrate in Japan, it will be very difficult to continue the conventional maintenance method of rolling stocks in near future. So we begin to study new technology for the design and maintenance of the rolling stocks, in order to make new strategy for reducing the life cycle cost of the rolling stocks.
1 The Analysis of Present Situation
The maintenance cost of rolling stocks holds the large part of whole operation cost. Comparing with other industry, our maintenance system falls behind in the manner and method.
When we analyze our system by ourselves, we can find some major problems as below.
* Our design of rolling stocks is short of maintenance-free concept.
* Our inspection rule of rolling stocks is too conservative to manage rolling stocks which are designed on new technology.
* Comparing with other industry, we fall behind in the system design of our maintenance facility.
* Our maintenance style is too old to cope with the shortage of young age workers and the alteration of the work style.
So we are now starting to make the middle term strategy in order to improve our maintenance system.
2 The New Design Concept of the Production Plan
1) New design concept of rolling stocks
In order to minimize the life cycle cost of rolling stocks, we make the concept of new rolling stock design as "simple-structure and maintenance-free ". With that concept, we are trying to improve the production strategy of rolling stocks. (Fig. 2-1)
2) The design concept of equipment with a reliability analysis
The design concept of the equipment of rolling stocks is that they have to be used more than 20 years with a periodical inspection and maintenance. So there are no consideration of "down-time influence" and "life cycle cost" on design concept.
