Exploring improved maintenance strategies of railway registration systems at the intersection of principal-agent theory and economic relevance

Abstract

Since 2011, an electronic registration system, called the OV chip card, has been in use in the Netherlands for the payment of all public transport. As a result, the Dutch Railways (NS) have implemented all the necessary equipment to support the sales and validation processes of this system. Another company (Thales, the agent) has been hired to maintain all these resources on behalf of NS (the principal). In this paper, qualitative and quantitative research into the current maintenance process has been carried out. This research shows that various inefficiencies occur in the current maintenance process. The most important ones are unnecessary process steps for the mechanic at Thales, multiple Work Order Tasks to solve single incidents and the difficulty to plan efficiently due to the many fatal failures. Additionally, this study shows that collaboration between the principal and the agent is an essential factor which can undermine efficiency. An important example of inefficiency due to poor collaboration is the occurrence of repeated failures. This is caused by a lack of transparency on past maintenance of particular resources. In this case study, four crucial improvement directions are identified. In no particular order, these are a different maintenance strategy, the prevention of unnecessary and repeated processes, transparency in data and demand-driven failure prioritisation. Generalisation of this research is difficult, but this study shows that in complex maintenance situations problems can be solved with both technical and procedural adjustments, as well as by improved cooperation between the party that commissioned the maintenance and the party who then performs the maintenance.