PhD position in Quality TechnologyLulea
- Statistically Based Railway Maintenance Planning
We are now recruiting a graduate student in quality engineering to conduct research on tools for statistically based maintenance planning within railway.
Swedish railway infrastructure has long been stifled by lacking investments and maintenance funding. The traffic load has, however, continued to increase and the total transported tonnage is expected to increase by 47% from year 2006 until 2050. Hence, keeping the railway infrastructure available to accommodate trains is increasingly challenging when the infrastructure is approaching its capacity limits. In addition, the increasing traffic leads to increased degradation, which in turn requires more maintenance. However, the available time for maintenance simultaneously decreases and the risk of traffic disturbances due to the maintenance actions increases. To balance the infrastructure capacity between traffic and maintenance needs and to increase the efficiency of maintenance actions by more effective maintenance planning is therefore challenging.
Subject description
The scientific discipline of quality technology includes principles, ways of working, and tools for customer and sustainability driven development of products and processes. The research subject has an industrial basis, but with applications also in other sectors.
Project description
The project aims to develop an approach for planning the maintenance of railway infrastructure that makes maintenance operations more efficient and/or effective. More efficient maintenance activities are activities that with equivalent resources improve the condition of the system more than existing approaches; or those that achieve equal improvement with less spent resources. Resources here refers to cost or time requirements. Planning should allow for coordinated maintenance actions where maintenance is performed in parallel at several places when a track section is shut down. The maintenance planning method combines modern, statistically based methods for assessing the railway condition with models describing costs and risks of different maintenance tasks. The approach includes optimizing planned maintenance activities based partly on data-driven monitoring of the system’s current status and deterioration rate, the estimates of cost and time requirements and risks of various maintenance operations, such as delays. Calculations of system condition and its deterioration rate also allow maintenance prognoses, which also will be integrated in the planning model. A more efficient and coordinated planning of maintenance primarily contributes to higher capacity of the railway system. The proposed project is a three-year collaboration project between Luleå University of Technology, Trafikverket (Swedish Transport Administration) and the company eMaintenance365.
Duties
The PhD student in this project will study condition based maintenance and maintenance planning from a statistical perspective. Tasks include studies of the usefulness of different suggested methods, and to create a system for evaluating data from a quality perspective that contributes to statistically based decision criteria for maintenance planning.
You will work in a project that involves collaboration with international researchers focused on developing a methodology for optimized scheduling of maintenance tasks for making maintenance more resource efficient, meaning less spent resources for keeping the railway system available for its purpose, i.e. transports. Tasks also include PhD course work, conducting and publishing research in peer-reviewed international journals, contributing to and presenting at international conferences, and possibly teaching duties.
The PhD studies are 4 years, fulltime.Administration and/or lecturing of up to 20% may be added.
Qualifications
For this PhD candidate position, eligible candidates need a Master of Science (or civilingenjörsexamen) in the areas of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Technical Physics, Applied Statistics or the like. Since this research relies on communication, we require good command of English writing. Since the position requires mathematical based reasoning, problem solving skills are of utmost importance. We prefer that you can start working as soon as possible.
For more information please click "Further Official Information" below.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
http://web103.reachmee.com/ext/I003/583/job?site=6&lang=UK&validator=e4575239eb8c0828707e2b716f86c5f8&job_id=2097