Scope of the Seminar

Maintenance is defined ( IEC 60-300 3-14) as the combination of all technical and ad ministrative actions, including supervision actions, intended to retain an item in, or restore it to, a state in which it can perform a req uired function. Over the last decades, most industries as well as government services have come to consider maintenance as an im portant support function, which plays a key role in achieving organisational goals. Maintenance policy is now recognised as a fundamental input to achieve the required performance levels, in particular availability.
This trend is reinforced by the increasingly frequent practice of outsourcing maintenance, found across the board in a large spectrum of activities such as energy (e.g. electrical power generation and transmission), transportation (such as railway infrastructure and rolling stock; or the aerospace industry), facilities (such as hospitals, ships, etc;) or the manufacturing industry. A complementary view is that maintenance is a way of reducing business risk, by increa sing the chances of fulfilling the required functions at the desired performance level.

At the same time, the importance of maintenance costs in asset life-cycle cost, i.e. the cumulative costs incurred over an asset’s lifetime, is increasingly recognised. Life-cycle cost is now routinely used as a design selection criterion, and system suppliers are now required to commit to a life cycle cost at the same time as they commit to service levels characterised by performance attributes such as availability, throughput or punctuality. Thus a key challenge, which confronts system designers, is that of designing for a high service level while keeping life-cycle cost reasonably low.

Topics

• Designing for Maintainability and Maintenance
• Life-cycle Cost (LCC) and Availability Performance: prediction
• Life-cycle Cost (LCC) and Availability Performance: validation
• Deriving cost-effective maintenance policies: reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) and other approaches
• Advances in Failure Diagnostics and Prognostics
• Maintenance Performance Indicators
• Imperfect maintenance: modelling and measurement