Each failure mode is a ledger account. Debit: what it costs you. Credit: what your maintenance reduces. Balance: your residual exposure. One wagon, six accounts, live.
Every asset manager can name the failure modes of their fleet. Nobody can tell you, in a single number, what residual exposure each one carries after the maintenance programme has done its work. That number does not exist in SAP, Oracle, or Maximo today — not because it cannot be computed, but because nobody assigned each failure mode a persistent accounting object in which to carry the computation.
The Failure Mode Ledger Account (FMLA) is that object. It applies Pacioli's double-entry principle to reliability engineering: liability side (consequence), mitigation side (task), balance (residual exposure). Five economic KPIs fall out of the two sides.
Six failure modes drawn from the Swiss Federal Office of Transport Fehlerkatalog (BAV-FK-V18-2026, currently in force). Codes, descriptions, severity classes and detection guidance are regulatory; the accounting layer on top — likelihood, task parameters, TE base coefficients — is what Kerne adds.
Click any row to see the computation and citation. Click a column header to sort.
| BAV code | Failure mode | Sev | Lik | Task | AH | CW | TE | FME-x | MER | Verdict |
|---|
This is one wagon. A wagon keeper holding approximately 6 000 Sggmrs-class container wagons in European service. Multiply. Sum FME-x across the fleet. That number — the portfolio residual exposure — is what a reinsurer prices, what a lessor carries on their books at handover, and what an asset manager is accountable to reduce.
It does not exist in any maintenance system on the market today. Not because the data is unavailable — it is right there, in the BAV catalog and the maintenance plan — but because no system has ever given each failure mode its own accounting object in which to carry the balance.
The same data served live via the corpus API:
curl -s "https://kerne.systems/corpus/transport/rail/v1/api.php?scenario=a&chapter=3&risk=Critical" \
| jq -r '.failure_modes[] | "\(.rds_component) \(.failure_mode)"'Returns the four Critical brake failure modes from the BAV catalog. The FMLA computation is applied on top of this regulatory foundation.