There Is No Superior Maintenance Style in Asset Management

Goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the considerations that drive the decision for a preferred maintenance style. Underlying statistical analyses are provided by given references to earlier published work.

Reliability and risk-based considerations affect the maintenance style for asset management during the operational life of a system of assets. Performance and reliability assessment of assets are driven by probabilistic and distribution function oriented analysis based on failure data statistics and condition monitoring. Highly reliable, capital-intensive and long-living components usually provide very small datasets collected from accelerated aging tests and field data which make predictions of future failure times difficult. Capital-intensive power-electronic components increasingly gain an important role in power networks and replacement should be scheduled carefully. Therefore, there is an increased need for prognostics and health management also for power electronic systems in order to prevent unplanned failure series.

A framework is presented to assess different maintenance styles on the basis of a common framework and in relation to (partially redundant) system configurations and the available resources for repair or replacement. Eventually, public-private context-driven values, backpropagated to the assets expressed in terms of Health Indices, Risk Index and possible other Asset Indices, determine which maintenance style is most effective and affordable.

Keywords: Reliability, Risk, Hazard rate, Maintenance, Asset management, Prognostics, Health management.

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