System Reliability and Maintainability Assessment through Simulation: A Case Study of Bus Dynamic Operation in Transit Networks

The dependability assessment (i.e., reliability, maintainability) to bus dynamic operation in transit networks is playing increasingly important role in designing routes, creating timetables, scheduling bus to trips and assigning drivers. Since failures and repairs can occur at any time and even simultaneously during the bus operation process, in-operate repair or replacement that subjects to random times to failure must be made before the maximum bus downtime is exceeded. Also, in-operate maintenance must take into account such factors as time to repair, failure rates, repair rates, and distributions of the preceding factors. In this paper, we have carried out the assessment of bus dynamic operation in special transit networks through simulation as a case study. It is shown that the system dependability assessment method through simulation is powerful and adaptable to measure the reliability and maintainability of bus dynamic operation whose subsystems/components follow to arbitrary failure and repair distributions. The emphasis of this paper is also placed on the presentation of algorithm of dependability simulation and simulation procedures.