Integrated reliability and optimal maintenance schedule design: a Life Cycle Cost based approach

Abstract

Customers of industrial system/machines are becoming increasingly focused on life cycle performance of products for their purchase decisions. Manufacturers of such type of products, for example machine tools, are experiencing increased pressure from customers to deliver customised products with documented reliability, maintainability, maintenance and support characteristics and also with minimum environmental impacts. In this article, first the problem has been explored in the context of Indian machine tool industry and also from literature perspective. Some of the important issues are listed and research steps are identified to address these issues.

TCO Evaluation in Physical Asset Management: Benefits and Limitations for Industrial Adoption

“…Though, generally speaking only 15% of the total TCO is consumed during the design and the development phase, research has shown that as much as 85% of the remaining TCO is determined by decisions made during this stage (Lad and Kulkarni, 2008). The early identification of acquisition and ownership costs provides the decision makers with more opportunity of balancing performance, reliability, maintenance support and other goals against life cycle costs by taking documented decisions such as using different levels of automation, redundancies, etc.…”

“…The key factor is to find an optimal level of maintenance service in order to be consistent with the organization's objective of attaining minimum total cost (Woodward, 1997). In fact, maintenance offers the opportunity to strongly influence the TCO through different strategies by balancing failure and preventive maintenance costs (Thiede et al, 2012), hence, asset users have great opportunities to evaluate different policies through a cost evaluation (Lad and Kulkarni, 2008). Likewise, decisions on the operative conditions of the asset; its utilization and the production strategies can be supported by the TCO evaluation.…”

“…Nevertheless, presently these concepts are increasingly being considered by industrial goods manufacturers too. In fact, the emergent global competition is now forcing the manufacturing industry to estimate and optimize the overall system life cycle cost with reference to performance, safety, reliability and maintainability (Waghmode and Sahasrabudhe, 2012) in order to be able to compete not only on price, but on cost effectiveness and technological leadership also (Lad and Kulkarni, 2008). More and more contracts are based on TCO evaluation in several sectors such as the automotive, the packaging and the food sectors.…”

“…The widely shared idea is that TCO provides a selected perspective on LCC. In contrast to LCC, it focuses on the ownership perspective of the considered object and all the costs that occur during the course of ownership (Lad and Kulkarni, 2008;Thiede et al, 2012). Moreover (Clarke, 1990) and other authors later on, gave it a more strategic connotation than the general concept of LCC, giving it the meaning of a supporting information for strategic choices regarding both investment decisions and operational strategies.…”

Integrated production and maintenance planning for parallel machine system considering cost of rejection

“…Linderman et al (2005) have shown the economic benefits of jointly considering process control and maintenance decision policies. Lad and Kulkarni (2008) state that failure of machine tool may either stop the machine or lead to poor performance like increased rejections. Pandey et al (2010) presented an approach that considers the effect of rejection cost on optimal maintenance planning decisions.…”