CBM in multi-component systems

PhD ceremony: Mr. J. Koochaki, 11.00 uur, Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen

Dissertation: CBM in multi-component systems

Promotor(s): prof. J.C. Wortmann

Faculty: Economics and Business

The competitive global market has increased the need for reliable and cost-effective production systems. This has forced plants to move from the traditional corrective and time-based maintenance towards Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM). Companies invest in CBM, but there is evidence that CBM implementations are usually successful in a technical sense, but less successful economically.

One of the potential reasons for CBM programme failure may be that the justification of CBM usually does not consider the plant-wide effects. In this thesis Koochaki studied how CBM behaves in a multi-component environment. He used computer simulation, investigated three characteristics of multi-component systems and analysed the impacts of production context, opportunistic maintenance and maintenance work force constraints on the effectiveness of CBM.

The results reveal that CBM is an attractive policy in optimizing the maintenance performance for a single component. However, it is important to use metrics that reveal the impact of implementing CBM on the performance of the entire asset-system rather than the performance of a single component. The performance of CBM in the presence of other components and group maintenance strategies is not straightforward and can in some instances even be lower than in other policies. Effects like blocking and starving and the ease of grouping and planning maintenance events are shown to play a significant role. The findings throw light on possible causes of CBM programme failures and assist stakeholders to evaluate CBM in a plant-wide perspective, which constitutes a more realistic framework.