The technical meaning of maintenance involves functional checks, servicing, repairing or replacing of necessary devices, equipment, machinery, building infrastructure, and supporting utilities in industrial, business, and residential installations. [1] [2] Over time, this has come to include multiple wordings that describe various cost-effective practices to keep equipment operational; these activities occur either before [3] or after a failure.
Maintenance functions can be defined as maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), and MRO is also used for maintenance, repair and operations. [4] Over time, the terminology of maintenance and MRO has begun to become standardized. The United States Department of Defense uses the following definitions: [5]
Maintenance is strictly connected to the utilization stage of the product or technical system, in which the concept of maintainability must be included. In this scenario, maintainability is considered as the ability of an item, under stated conditions of use, to be retained in or restored to a state in which it can perform its required functions, using prescribed procedures and resources. [6]
In some domains like aircraft maintenance, terms maintenance, repair and overhaul [7] also include inspection, rebuilding, alteration and the supply of spare parts, accessories, raw materials, adhesives, sealants, coatings and consumables for aircraft maintenance at the utilization stage. In international civil aviation maintenance means:
This definition covers all activities for which aviation regulations require issuance of a maintenance release document (aircraft certificate of return to service – CRS).
The marine and air transportation, [9] offshore structures, [10] industrial plant and facility management industries depend on maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) including scheduled or preventive paint maintenance programmes to maintain and restore coatings applied to steel in environments subject to attack from erosion, corrosion and environmental pollution. [10]
The basic types of maintenance falling under MRO include:
Architectural conservation employs MRO to preserve, rehabilitate, restore, or reconstruct historical structures with stone, brick, glass, metal, and wood which match the original constituent materials where possible, or with suitable polymer technologies when not. [12]
Preventive maintenance (PM) is "a routine for periodically inspecting" with the goal of "noticing small problems and fixing them before major ones develop." [13] Ideally, "nothing breaks down." [14]
The main goal behind PM is for the equipment to make it from one planned service to the next planned service without any failures caused by fatigue, extreme fluctuation in temperature(such as heat waves [15] ) during seasonal changes, neglect, or normal wear (preventable items), which Planned Maintenance and Condition Based Maintenance help to achieve by replacing worn components before they actually fail. Maintenance activities include partial or complete overhauls at specified periods, oil changes, lubrication, minor adjustments, and so on. In addition, workers can record equipment deterioration so they know to replace or repair worn parts before they cause system failure.
The New York Times gave an example of "machinery that is not lubricated on schedule" that functions "until a bearing burns out." Preventive maintenance contracts are generally a fixed cost, whereas improper maintenance introduces a variable cost: replacement of major equipment. [13]
Main objective of PM are:
Preventive maintenance or preventative [16] maintenance (PM) has the following meanings:
Other terms and abbreviations related to PM are:
Planned preventive maintenance (PPM), more commonly referred to as simply planned maintenance (PM) or scheduled maintenance, is any variety of scheduled maintenance to an object or item of equipment. Specifically, planned maintenance is a scheduled service visit carried out by a competent and suitable agent, to ensure that an item of equipment is operating correctly and to therefore avoid any unscheduled breakdown and downtime. [23]
The key factor as to when and why this work is being done is timing, and involves a service, resource or facility being unavailable. [18] [19] By contrast, condition-based maintenance is not directly based on equipment age.
Planned maintenance is preplanned, and can be date-based, based on equipment running hours, or on distance travelled.
Parts that have scheduled maintenance at fixed intervals, usually due to wearout or a fixed shelf life, are sometimes known as time-change interval, or TCI items.
Predictive maintenance techniques are designed to help determine the condition of in-service equipment in order to estimate when maintenance should be performed. This approach promises cost savings over routine or time-based preventive maintenance, because tasks are performed only when warranted. Thus, it is regarded as condition-based maintenance carried out as suggested by estimations of the degradation state of an item. The main promise of predictive maintenance is to allow convenient scheduling of corrective maintenance, and to prevent unexpected equipment failures. [3] This maintenance strategy uses sensors to monitor key parameters within a machine or system, and uses this data in conjunction with analysed historical trends to continuously evaluate the system health and predict a breakdown before it happens. [24] This strategy allows maintenance to be performed more efficiently, since more up-to-date data is obtained about how close the product is to failure. [25]
Predictive replacement is the replacement of an item that is still functioning properly. [26] Usually it is a tax-benefit based [ citation needed ] replacement policy whereby expensive equipment or batches of individually inexpensive supply items are removed and donated on a predicted/fixed shelf life schedule. These items are given to tax-exempt institutions. [27] [ citation needed ]
Condition-based maintenance (CBM), shortly described, is maintenance when need arises. Albeit chronologically much older, It is considered one section or practice inside the broader and newer predictive maintenance field, where new AI technologies and connectivity abilities are put to action and where the acronym CBM is more often used to describe 'condition Based Monitoring' rather than the maintenance itself. CBM maintenance is performed after one or more indicators show that equipment is going to fail or that equipment performance is deteriorating.
This concept is applicable to mission-critical systems that incorporate active redundancy and fault reporting. It is also applicable to non-mission critical systems that lack redundancy and fault reporting.
Condition-based maintenance was introduced to try to maintain the correct equipment at the right time. CBM is based on using real-time data to prioritize and optimize maintenance resources. Observing the state of the system is known as condition monitoring. Such a system will determine the equipment's health, and act only when maintenance is actually necessary. Developments in recent years have allowed extensive instrumentation of equipment, and together with better tools for analyzing condition data, the maintenance personnel of today is more than ever able to decide what is the right time to perform maintenance on some piece of equipment. Ideally, condition-based maintenance will allow the maintenance personnel to do only the right things, minimizing spare parts cost, system downtime and time spent on maintenance.
Despite its usefulness of equipment, there are several challenges to the use of CBM. First and most important of all, the initial cost of CBM can be high. It requires improved instrumentation of the equipment. Often the cost of sufficient instruments can be quite large, especially on equipment that is already installed. Wireless systems have reduced the initial cost. Therefore, it is important for the installer to decide the importance of the investment before adding CBM to all equipment. A result of this cost is that the first generation of CBM in the oil and gas industry has only focused on vibration in heavy rotating equipment.
Secondly, introducing CBM will invoke a major change in how maintenance is performed, and potentially to the whole maintenance organization in a company. Organizational changes are in general difficult.
Also, the technical side of it is not always as simple. Even if some types of equipment can easily be observed by measuring simple values such as vibration (displacement, velocity or acceleration), temperature or pressure, it is not trivial to turn this measured data into actionable knowledge about the health of the equipment.
As systems get more costly, and instrumentation and information systems tend to become cheaper and more reliable, CBM becomes an important tool for running a plant or factory in an optimal manner. Better operations will lead to lower production cost and lower use of resources. And lower use of resources may be one of the most important differentiators in a future where environmental issues become more important by the day.
Another scenario where value can be created is by monitoring the health of a car motor. Rather than changing parts at predefined intervals, the car itself can tell you when something needs to be changed based on cheap and simple instrumentation.
It is Department of Defense policy that condition-based maintenance (CBM) be "implemented to improve maintenance agility and responsiveness, increase operational availability, and reduce life cycle total ownership costs". [28]
CBM has some advantages over planned maintenance:
Its disadvantages are:
Today, due to its costs, CBM is not used for less important parts of machinery despite obvious advantages. However it can be found everywhere where increased safety is required, and in future will be applied even more widely. [29] [30]
Corrective maintenance is a type of maintenance used for equipment after equipment break down or malfunction is often most expensive – not only can worn equipment damage other parts and cause multiple damage, but consequential repair and replacement costs and loss of revenues due to down time during overhaul can be significant. Rebuilding and resurfacing of equipment and infrastructure damaged by erosion and corrosion as part of corrective or preventive maintenance programmes involves conventional processes such as welding and metal flame spraying, as well as engineered solutions with thermoset polymeric materials. [31]
In reliability engineering, the term availability has the following meanings:
Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or service. It is a management accounting concept that can be used in full cost accounting or even ecological economics where it includes social costs.
SIA Engineering Company Limited is a Singaporean company specializing in aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) services in the Asia-Pacific. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Singapore Airlines Group (SIA), formed in 1992 by separating SIA's engineering division.
Reliability engineering is a sub-discipline of systems engineering that emphasizes the ability of equipment to function without failure. Reliability is defined as the probability that a product, system, or service will perform its intended function adequately for a specified period of time, OR will operate in a defined environment without failure. Reliability is closely related to availability, which is typically described as the ability of a component or system to function at a specified moment or interval of time.
A type certificate signifies the airworthiness of a particular category of aircraft, according to its manufacturing design. Certification confirms that the aircraft of a new type intended for serial production is in compliance with applicable airworthiness requirements established by the national air law.
Integrated logistics support (ILS) is a technology in the system engineering to lower a product life cycle cost and decrease demand for logistics by the maintenance system optimization to ease the product support. Although originally developed for military purposes, it is also widely used in commercial customer service organisations.
Optimal maintenance is the discipline within operations research concerned with maintaining a system in a manner that maximizes profit or minimizes cost. Cost functions depending on the reliability, availability and maintainability characteristics of the system of interest determine the parameters to minimize. Parameters often considered are the cost of failure, the cost per time unit of "downtime", the cost of corrective maintenance, the cost per time unit of preventive maintenance and the cost of repairable system replacement [Cassady and Pohl]. The foundation of any maintenance model relies on the correct description of the underlying deterioration process and failure behavior of the component, and on the relationships between maintained components in the product breakdown.
Aircraft maintenance checks are periodic inspections that have to be done on all commercial and civil aircraft after a certain amount of time or usage. Military aircraft normally follow specific maintenance programmes which may, or may not, be similar to those of commercial and civil operators.
Condition monitoring is the process of monitoring a parameter of condition in machinery, in order to identify a significant change which is indicative of a developing fault. It is a major component of predictive maintenance. The use of condition monitoring allows maintenance to be scheduled, or other actions to be taken to prevent consequential damages and avoid its consequences. Condition monitoring has a unique benefit in that conditions that would shorten normal lifespan can be addressed before they develop into a major failure. Condition monitoring techniques are normally used on rotating equipment, auxiliary systems and other machinery like belt-driven equipment,, while periodic inspection using non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques and fit for service (FFS) evaluation are used for static plant equipment such as steam boilers, piping and heat exchangers.
Predictive maintenance techniques are designed to help determine the condition of in-service equipment in order to estimate when maintenance should be performed. This approach promises cost savings over routine or time-based preventive maintenance, because tasks are performed only when warranted. Thus, it is regarded as condition-based maintenance carried out as suggested by estimations of the degradation state of an item.
Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a concept of maintenance planning to ensure that systems continue to do what their users require in their present operating context. Successful implementation of RCM will lead to increase in cost effectiveness, reliability, machine uptime, and a greater understanding of the level of risk that the organization is managing.
In organizational management, mean down time (MDT) is the average time that a system is non-operational. This includes all downtime associated with repair, corrective and preventive maintenance, self-imposed downtime, and any logistics or administrative delays.
The term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable. The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline. This is usually a result of the system failing to function because of an unplanned event, or because of routine maintenance.
Aircraft maintenance is the performance of tasks required to ensure the continuing airworthiness of an aircraft or aircraft part, including overhaul, inspection, replacement, defect rectification, and the embodiment of modifications, compliance with airworthiness directives and repair.
Jat Tehnika is a Serbian aerospace company providing aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul. The company is based at Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport and provides services for Air Serbia and other airlines across Europe.
Corrective maintenance is a maintenance task performed to identify, isolate, and rectify a fault so that the failed equipment, machine, or system can be restored to an operational condition within the tolerances or limits established for in-service operations.
A spare part, spare, service part, repair part, or replacement part, is an interchangeable part that is kept in an inventory and used for the repair or refurbishment of defective equipment/units. Spare parts are an important feature of logistics engineering and supply chain management, often comprising dedicated spare parts management systems.
Availability is the probability that a system will work as required when required during the period of a mission. The mission could be the 18-hour span of an aircraft flight. The mission period could also be the 3 to 15-month span of a military deployment. Availability includes non-operational periods associated with reliability, maintenance, and logistics.
Integrated vehicle health management (IVHM) or integrated system health management (ISHM) is the unified capability of systems to assess the current or future state of the member system health and integrate that picture of system health within a framework of available resources and operational demand.
The Aerospace Technology Systems Corporation Sdn Bhd (ATSC), is a Malaysian aerospace company that providing aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) service. Its subsidiary of National Aerospace and Defence Industries Sdn Bhd (NADI) and incorporated by Ministry of Finance (MoF).
All actions which have the objective of retaining or restoring an item in or to a state in which it can perform its required function. These include the combination of all technical and corresponding administrative, managerial, and supervision actions.
The Airworthiness Manual (Doc 9760) contains a consolidation of airworthiness-related information previously found in other ICAO documents ... provides guidance to States on how to meet their airworthiness responsibilities under the Convention on International Civil Aviation. This third edition is presented based on States' roles and responsibilities, thus as State of Registry, State of the Operator, State of Design and State of Manufacture. It also describes the interface between different States and their related responsibilities. It has been updated to incorporate changes to Annex 8 to the Chicago Convention — Airworthiness of Aircraft, and to Annex 6 — Operation of Aircraft
Complaints about preventative go back to the late 18th century ... ("Oxford English Dictionary dates preventive to 1626 and preventative to 1655) ..preventive has won"
... out of service from 6:00–7:00am Eastern for regularly scheduled maintenance.
... will be down for approximately five days