Dynamic maintenance based on functional usage profiles

Abstract

Purpose: For many decades, it has been recognized that maintenance activities should be adapted to the specific usage of a system. For that reason, many advanced policies have been developed, such as condition-based and load-based maintenance policies. However, these policies require advanced monitoring techniques and rather detailed understanding of the failure behavior, which requires the support of an OEM or expert, prohibiting application by an operator in many cases. The present work proposes a maintenance policy that relieves the high (technical) demands set by these existing policies and provides a more accurate specification of the required (dynamic) maintenance interval than traditional usage-based maintenance. Design/methodology/approach: The methodology followed starts with a review and critical assessment of existing maintenance policies, which are classified according to six different aspects. Based on the need for a technically less demanding policy that appears from this comparison, a new policy is developed. The consecutive steps required for this functional usage profiles based maintenance policy are then critically discussed: usage profile definition, monitoring, profile severity quantification and the possible extension to the fleet level. After the description of the proposed policy, it is demonstrated in three case studies on real systems. Findings: A maintenance policy based on a simple usage registration procedure appears to be feasible, which enables a significantly more efficient maintenance process than the traditional usage-based policies. This is demonstrated by the policy proposed here. Practical implications: The proposed maintenance policy based on functional usage profiles offers the operators of fleets of systems the opportunity to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their maintenance process, without the need for a high investment in advanced monitoring systems and in experts interpreting the results. Originality/value: The original contribution of this work is the explicit definition of a new maintenance policy, which combines the benefits of considering the effects of usage or environment severity with a limited investment in monitoring technology.