Critical Components Selection for a Prognostics and Health Management System Design: an Application to an Overhead Contact System

In recent years, improving quality of rail services by increasing availability, saving energy, and cutting the costs of infrastructure and rolling stock maintenance has become a central concern in the railway industry. Furthermore, considerable research efforts have been devoted to develop monitoring and health management solutions for the rail transportation systems. Streaming data from trains, infrastructure and signaling systems became a key subject for an implementation of a predictive maintenance. Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is an approach that aims to support a predictive maintenance program. Basically, the first step to develop a PHM system is to identify critical components. This paper emphasizes on the critical components selection step. It presents a methodology to identify the critical components for the design of a PHM solution. The proposed methodology is based on objectives definition for PHM and it is applied to an Overhead Contact System (OCS)