Selection of vehicles for fleet of transport company on the basis of observation of their operational reliability

The exploitation reliability of the contemporary light commercial vehicles of four makes is subject to a quantitative analysis in the article. The issue concerning the quantitative evaluation of the operational reliability of the fleet of the commercial vehicles in the transport company and their selection for this fleet is not very numerously described in the literature. For the purposes of evaluating the operational reliability, results of monitoring failures of 115 vehicles during their several years of exploitation in the similar conditions in the urban area and its surroundings were used. A proposed test method uses the relative quantitative measures of the operational reliability indices targeted at the mileage of vehicles and frequency of the failures. The aforementioned enabled to identify the make of the vehicles, which during exploitation was characterized by the lowest failure frequency and thus reliability. This, in turn, allowed for a favorable selection of the vehicles within the next years of the operation of the company. The results of the study confirmed the possibility of using the proposed method to evaluate the operational reliability of the commercial vehicles in any transport company.