Condition Based Maintenance Systems - An Investigation of Technical Constituents and Organizational Aspects

Productivity is a key strategy for manufacturing companies to stay competitive in a continuously growing global market. Increased availability of production equipment is crucial for competitiveness and, to achieve increased availability, a good maintenance strategy is necessary. Good maintenance is achieved by having few corrective maintenance tasks performed while the preventive maintenance is kept to a minimum. Condition based maintenance is one possible way of achieving this. Condition based maintenance and the use of condition based maintenance systems ensures that the condition of an item is always monitored and alarm limits can be programmed or specified to alert attention if the condition exceeds specified accepted levels. In-depth analysis of the monitored data provides a diagnosis and prognosis of an incipient fault. Everything is taken into consideration when scheduling predictive maintenance actions, autonomously or in interaction with humans. Investigations indicate that there is a lot of money to gain in increasing item availability, with the implementation of condition based maintenance as one possibility. Other investigations have shown that condition based maintenance is not widely utilized within the Swedish industry and that the monitoring that takes place is mostly subjective monitoring performed by humans. The objective of this thesis is to investigate technical constituents and organizational aspects in a condition based maintenance system in order to make the condition based maintenance strategy more accessible within Swedish industry. Within technical constituents, standards and standardization proposals have been investigated as one possible constituent. Several standards already published and a couple of standardization proposals have been found for developers of condition based maintenance system technology to use, as well as for customers to demand. These standards would increase a system’s technology modularization and flexibility performance. Condition based maintenance system technology, e.g. how to technically design a system, has also been highlighted. Seven modules have been investigated in order to achieve a comprehensive system function. Sensors, signal processing, condition monitoring, diagnosis, prognosis, decision support, and presentation all need to exist in the form of hardware/software or as specifications for humans to perform. Regarding the organizational aspects, investigations in implementing aspects have been performed. Results from the organizational investigations show that it would be feasible to design an implementation strategy for condition based maintenance, an implementation strategy that would help companies to go from a strategy that is not condition based to a strategy that is condition based. Several aspects that are to be considered when deciding to implement condition based maintenance, such as support from top management, training of employees, increased cooperation between departments, pilot projects on single systems, etc., are also highlighted.