Equipment reliability and maintenance

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The cost to organizations, such as manufacturing, mining, public utilities or process industries, of maintaining and replacing their physical assets represents a significant portion of their annual operating budget. For example, in the mining industry the maintenance budget may be in excess of 50% of annual operating costs. In manufacturing, 15 to 40% of total manufacturing costs are maintenance related. The overall goal of the proposed research program is to continue investigations into the use of quantitative procedures to enhance plant and equipment maintenance, replacement and reliability decision making. Work previously funded by an NSERC Research grant focused on condition-based maintenance (CBM) which takes into consideration the actual condition of equipment when deciding whether or not preventive maintenance is necessary. This research thrust "spun-off" in 1995 the University of Toronto's CBM Laboratory that has been underwritten since then with over $3,000,000 in private and public funding to arrive at practical commercially-accepted solution procedures to answer the key decisions of what the best maintenance action is when data is obtained from equipment inspected as part of a CBM program. The goal of this proposal is to seek continuing NSERC support to enable other important decision situations in maintenance to be addressed, such as optimizing extended time-based maintenance decisions that are frequently the outcome of an organization using the methodology of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) to establish their maintenance plans. We also plan to explore how to measure the overall performance of the maintenance function, such that formal maintenance procedures can be developed then employed by engineering managers for challenging decision situations. Furthermore, two closely related issues are to be explored. They are the inspection problem and spare parts inventory problem. The research direction is motivated by practice, and may be thought of as "industry-guided applied research".