Cost squeeze Age Life Cycle

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Advisory Group for Rail Research and Innovation
Cost squeeze Age/ Life Cycle Rebeka Sellick,
Engineering Director, ATOC 19 March 2004
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Cost Squeeze Age/Life Cycle
Layers 1. Key business needs (cheap now,
cost-effective future) 2. Factors to address to
deliver 1. 3. Areas where research would help
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Factor 1 common, therefore cheap, components

• Where research would help
• Interoperability should cure this, but research
  needed
• to develop interoperability specs details,
  especially to detail difficult interfaces in a
  way that is clear but doesnt inhibit future
  innovation
• to develop standard components within these specs

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Factor 2 predictable, safe failure modes
(graceful degradation)

• Where research would help
• Fundamental e.g. WRISA-type to enhance systems
  understanding and prevent catastrophic failure
• Applications e.g. condition-monitoring to
  identify incipient failures on critical
  components, to maximise inter-overhaul life

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Factor 3 Long-life, obsolescence-immune
repairable components

• Where research would help
• Understanding obsolescence risks and developing
  mitigations

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Factor 4 Guaranteed fault-free overhaul to
overhaul

• Where research would help
• Better understanding of failure modes - to
  mitigate them
• Built-in redundancy research to demonstrate
  whether extra capital and maintenance costs can
  be justified in life cycle model (with
  appropriate unreliability cost weighting to set
  against them)

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Factor 5 reliable enough

• Where research would help
• Value for money in terms of incremental
  reliability gains
• Understanding realistic reliability and
  capability of maintenance and operations,
  particularly of human interventions therein

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Factor 6 safe enough
Where research would help Research into real,
whole costs including modal shift how safe a
railway does the UK want to pay for?
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Factor 7 Life Cycle cost understanding
Where research would help Research into relative
costs and benefits of built-in redundancy and
subsequent failure costs, especially at broader,
system-wide level (like 4. above)
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Factor 8 clear SRA and ORR strategies to enable
long term planning and development
Where research would help ? Not itself an issue
for research, but should take the outputs of
other research areas as inputs
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Factor 9 Stable supply industry to enable
product development (of cheaper, better bits)
Where research would help Collaborative work on
reliability-critical subsystems from common pool
of component suppliers? e.g. power doors,
air-conditioning, points machines
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Factor 10 long franchises and contracts
Where research would help Research to
demonstrate the value or not of this (as proposed
to RSSB SCSM research stakeholder workshop in
March 04)
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Next steps
Discussion . . .