Estimation de la durée de vie des pièces caténaires

Catenary incidents can provoke service interruption with very high train delays. Therefore it is important to carry out a preventive maintenance. Several projects at SNCF (French Railways) focus on maintenance optimization. The study presented here is a part of this approach and aims to estimate the lifetime distribution of installed catenary components. Because of the large quantity of components, only the number of preventive and corrective replacements is available. This information enables us, however, to estimate the parameters of the lifetime distributions. A statistical method based on Markov chains and Markov jump processes is proposed for this estimation. It is thus possible to study the reliability of each component.