The objective of any equipment or system user is to be able to use its equipment or system as long as possible, the most easily possible and at lower cost.
We live today in a highly competitive world.
It is difficult for a business manager to define, operate and maintain a production system at the best possible performance level. Maintenance can make the difference and improve performance.
Maintenance however, has to be prepared.
This is Cegelec's choice. Our group has adopted a maintenance engineering approach based on the Integrated logistic support.
There are four objectives:
- Integrate our maintenance offer into customer's needs,
- Design maintenance along with the system to maintain,
- Integrate maintenance management into system management,
- Integrate maintenance means with each other.
Aiming permanently to:
Obtain the best system availability at lower cost.
Meeting these objectives involves that a specific method should be implemented.
This approach has been developed for the upstream design of the maintenance of luggage sorting systems in new airport terminals. The project includes the installation and the maintenance of over 50 km luggage conveyors, 4 km sorting systems, 7000 engines with their electrical and control equipment.
Functional analysis of the system
The luggage sorting system is a highly complex system. It is composed of different functions that can be analysed as follows:
Each piece of luggage delayed which has not arrived in time for boarding, causes a significant cost for the operator. The main purpose of the design is to reduce as much as possible the number of such delays.
This is why the functional analysis combined with a static then dynamic simulation will enable to optimise the redundancies that are necessary to meet the system objectives, alongside the dependability design.
Failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA)
The failure mode effects analysis aims to identify each failure mode , to analyse their effects , to assess how they occur, their effects at the system level and to analyse how to correct them. There are two possible solutions:
- According to criticality, there is first an analysis of the optimisation between the availability improvement and the resulting extra cost, while ensuring that the objectives are met. There is then an analysis of a change in the design ( replacement or change of equipment, additional redundancy)
- A definition of the maintenance task enabling to find an operational configuration as soon as possible.
To correct the identified failure mode, it is possible to define the maintenance task to solve the problem within acceptable time to meet the objectives. An analysis of the repair level can be conducted in order to identify who is going to perform the task, where and with which means.
This choice is made by taking into account the maintenance policy generally accepted, the maintenance levels, the maintenance concept.
Definition of means to perform maintenance tasks
Once the maintenance task is defined, it is possible to define which maintenance means are to be planned. The objective is to optimise them. Competences at the system level should be identified and regrouped, stores for spares should be installed at the right place and tools and equipment should be optimised in terms of quantities.
These means include:
- Staff,
- Training,
- Tools and equipment,
- Spares,
- Documentation,
- Workshops and warehouses,
- CMMS.
