Multistate Reliability Evaluation of Bogie on High Speed Railway Vehicle Based on the Network Flow Theory

Abstract

Bogie is one of the most major mechanical part of railway train. Its security and reliability are of paramount importance. Since research in this field is still on the early stage, which focus on either mechanical structure without condition or binary coherent systems. A multistate network flow model has been proposed in this paper with consideration of components degradation level and functional interaction between them. Firstly, the structure and function of the bogie for CRH3 were made a detailed introduction. Then transmission paths of three types force on bogie were study to determine the network strcture. Different from other papers, arcs represent the components and nodes are the transitive relation. Arc capacity tends to be confirmed easily with utilization of performance deterioration of elements on bogie involved in force tranferring. Flow rate of each arc depends on both component' health status and the task it undertakes. Furthermore, the minimal paths (MPs) method and the recursive sum of disjoint products (RSDP) with ordering heuristics are used for system reliability calculation; and the relative probability importance of each basic component and system reliability with and without forehead information are given at last. The results show that the network flow model works well on CRH3 bogie, and can support as guidance of bogie system design, daily system operation and predictive maintenance.