Increasing the Capacity of a Locomotive Depot by Prioritising Organisational and Technical Measures

One of the key elements affecting the capacity of the technical station with locomotive turnover points and the entire segment of railway network is an insufficient technical equipment of locomotive maintenance points (LMP), which is a «threshold» that prevents the stability of loaded trains’ traffic. To eliminate such threshold in a particular depot and the losses associated with unproductive downtime of transiting trains, as well as to increase the efficiency of LMP operation, it is necessary to provide for a series of organisational and technical measures. Such measures may be numerous and the task to determine their priority becomes rather difficult. This complexity is explained through different significance (impact on the process) and differentiated dimensions of the criteria necessary to make decision on correct prioritisation once those criteria are compared. The article proposes to use a special method, tested on a wide variety of practical problems, which allows selecting the best solution from the options under consideration or determining their priority (usefulness) to increase the capacity of a locomotive depot without limiting the number of decision-making criteria when considering possible organisational and technical measures. The work proposes most promising sequence of the organisational and technical measures to be considered to improve the efficiency of LMP using the method of expert assessments based on multi-criteria assessment, which involves the information necessary to solve the problem, converting it into a dimensionless form, which allows operating the corresponding initial data regardless of their size. The transformation of information is carried out according to a deterministic algorithm and does not depend on the person that makes computations, which indicates the objectivity of the obtained result of solving the problem. The proposed method for selecting the best option from those considered, as well as for choosing the sequence of their implementation, can also be used to solve similar problems in the absence or insufficiency of statistical data without carrying out complex economic calculations.