Colloquia

Samenvatting

Large asset-owning companies are performing risk-based asset management. These large asset-owning companies often operate in a challenging corporate environment with influences from the government, contractors, operators, and end-users. One of the important aspects of asset management is the maintenance of the asset. For this purpose, maintenance concepts are developed. In these maintenance concepts there is room for improvement by the means of feedback between the risk assessments and the actual occured risks. 

This research focuses on evaluating the risks that occurred in the case company: ProRail. The failure registration has been used in this research to evaluate and improve the corresponding maintenance concept. The primary risk category that has been analysed is the passenger nuisance.

Part of this evaluation was the design of a more specific sensitivity analysis on the risk appraisal scales. This sensitivity approach has provided insight into which risks are prone to switching from one level to a higher level (increasing the risk score) by a minimal change of environmental circumstances. 

The research shows that even small changes in risk estimations can have high impacts. Based on this it is suggested that improvement should focus on the areas in which most impact can be made. 

The designed process and evaluation methods are also evaluated and discussed based on the conducted case study. Based on the recommendations, the current feedback loop can be optimized. With regard to the sensitivity approach, it can be concluded that making the scale for passenger nuisance twice as strict, does not significantly influence the overall system risk. This provides some additional improvement directions. The proposed methods can potentially also be used in different environments as the principles are not context specific to only a rail environment.

Finally, an outlook is given on possible improvements of the presented model and for ProRail to optimize their maintenance concept evaluation processes.