Jan

Why a new maintenance concept?

Maintenance concepts include specific rules for guiding the maintenance selection procedure. This procedure involves rules for selecting critical components and appropriate maintenance policies for naval components (failure-based, use-based, condition-based). For maritime companies, developing maintenance concepts depends on fulfilling customer requirements at low costs, while at the same time assuring high functional system performance. Thus, such companies deal with business/added value, costs and functional/risk types of criteria.

Traditionally, maintenance concepts are based on Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). Such concepts focus only on functional/risk types of criteria, and less on costs. In order to include all the remaining business and cost criteria, additional analysis should be performed, making RCM time-inefficient. Furthermore, RCM cannot handle specific customer requirements very well. For example, some customers give priority to availability, while others prefer low life cycle costs. For this reason, a shift to a combinatorial evaluation of criteria is advised using multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is such a technique, which is used for translating the customer’s needs into maintenance engineering needs.