Maintenance cost forecasting for a fleet of vehicles

Generally, when purchasing of a fleet of vehicles, after-sales service includes maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) contract : this contract guarantees the fleet availability during several years under usage constraints. MRO contract is an undeniable marketing argument for automobile manufacturers, but it is also an additional cost which must be assessed. Particularly as this contracts last far beyond the equipments useful life. To manage the spare parts warehouse and to to assess the costs of maintenance and repairs, manufacturer must be able to forecast the number of failures for a list of critical equipments, throughout the contract. Extensive researches on spare parts inventory management could be found. But in the case of MRO contract on a fleet of vehicles, this issue is particulary difficult. First of all, guaranteed maximum availability during several years requires information on both equipments reliability and vehicles usages. Furthermore, there were many factors of instability of the spare parts requirement over the years: on the one hand equipments may have various modes of ageing either an equipment may be subjected to several mode of ageing ; on the other hand, vehicle usages may vary significantly according to the mission profile. The purpose of this article is forecast the spare parts requirement for a fleet of vehicles, over several years, using a simulation model based on statistical analysis of equipments inter-occurrences of failure and vehicle usages. By integrating this these two different cost drivers over the years, we provide a flexible tool of decision-making to prepare or manage a MRO contract for a fleet of vehicles