Assessing Wear Evolutions in Railway Wheelsets Using a Survival Modeling Approach

This paper provides a method to predict maintenance needs for the railway wheelsets by modeling the wear out affecting the wheelsets during its life cycle using survival analysis. Wear variations of wheel profiles are discretized and modeled through a censored survival approach, which is appropriate for modeling wheel profile degradation using real operation data from the condition monitoring systems that currently exist in railway companies. Several parametric distributions for the wear variations are modeled, and the behavior of the selected ones is analyzed and compared with wear trajectories computed by a Monte Carlo simulation procedure. This procedure aims to test the independence of events by adding small fractions of wear to reach larger wear values. The results show that the independence of wear events is not true for all the established events, but it is confirmed for small wear values. Overall, the proposed framework is developed in such a way that the outputs can be used to support predictions in condition-based maintenance models and to optimize the maintenance of wheelsets.