Maintenance Modelling and Applications

Maintenance is the process by which the state of any system or asset is controlled and can broadly be considered as two approaches: corrective and preventive.  The first of these is reactive and is carried out to rectify failures that have occurred. This type of maintenance cannot be planned and has the associated consequences of system unavailability as a result of the failure and lasts whilst the repairs are carried out.  Preventive maintenance has the advantage that it can be planned and performed at times which minimise the disruption to the system functionality.  The strategy implemented to maintain industrial systems is usually a balance between these two approaches to provide a cost effective means to produce an acceptable asset performance.  This text deals with the modelling of the maintenance process as a means to support the decision making for an effective maintenance strategy.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to maintenance and puts the text contents into context.

Chapters 2 – 9 contain papers providing technical contributions on the following themes:

• Prognostics
• System Reliability Modelling
• Maintenance Cost Modelling and Optimisation
• E-maintenance and Decision Making in Maintenance
• Fault Diagnostics
• Living Probabilistic Asset management
• Aviation Maintenance Engineering

Following the research presented in the initial chapters a very substantial chapter, chapter 10, contains a series of detailed case studies.  The case studies indicate how the maintenance models have been successfully applied to real engineering systems and the benefits resulting from such applications.

Finally a chapter is provided which contains some potential pitfalls which can be encountered with the application of maintenance models.

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