Maintenance costs constitute a major part of the total operating costs of any
manufacturing or production system. The aim of an optimal maintenance policy is to
provide optimal machine/plant availability, reliability and safety at the lowest possible
cost (Pham and Wang, 1996). With the large-scale industrialization and cut-throat
competition, the emphasis has shifted to system availability, reliability and safety, for
which effective maintenance is needed. Maintenance policies are broadly classified
into three categories: breakdown maintenance (Bevilacqua and Braglia, 2000), where
the system is maintained after a breakdown; preventive maintenance (Zhao, 2003;
and Ahmad and Kamaruddin, 2012), which involves regular periodic maintenance of
the system to prevent breakdowns; and predictive maintenance (Chu et al., 1998;
Dieulle et al., 2001; and Moya, 2004), which involves maintenance operation only
when required by the state of the system. According to Tan and Raghavan (2008),
maintenance has emerged from the age-old breakdown (or reactive) maintenance to
preventive maintenance to now popular Predictive Maintenance (PdM). There are several
benefits associated with PdM such as lower insurance rates, increased plant reliability,
improved product quality, better asset protection, reduced catastrophic and unexpected
machine failures, reduced spare parts inventory, reduced mean time between failure of
plant equipments and increased personnel safety, increased machine life, and reduced
energy consumption (Christer et al., 1997; Kakkar, 1999; Beltran and Lopez, 2000;
Lupinucci et al., 2000; Villar et al., 2000; and Carnero, 2006).
The practical implementation of PdM policy faces two major difficulties: one, absence
of any concrete statistical model for PdM (Tan and Raghvan, 2010); and two,
requirement of advanced monitoring technologies and sophisticated data acquisition
systems. These difficulties make the implementation of PdM policy complex and a
costly affair (Wendai and Daescu, 2002). In this paper, an effort has been made to
device a PdM policy with least use of costly advanced monitoring technologies. This
paper proposes a Modified FMEA technique, FMEORA (Failure Mode, Effects and
Output Range Analysis) for PdM.
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