On a systematic approach to development of maintenance plans for production equipment

Reliability is a collective term covering several abilities of the technical system: to deliver required functions, to uphold quality of products and services, to assure that the safety requirements associated with the system are properly fulfilled with regards both to the users and the environment and finally to uphold the durability of the technical system during its whole life cycle. All this has to be performed at acceptable risks, optimal cost, and correspond to operational needs of the business. Even though there is an advanced, well thought-out concept for this purpose - reliability centred maintenance (RCM) - that correctly applied might result in very good quality maintenance programs, it is not broadly used in the industry due to the vast efforts required for its implementation. An appropriate methodology supporting systematic functional break down of a studied systems, and guidelines how to couple functional failures to failure modes, integrated with RCM, would greatly speed up generating of effective maintenance programs. In this paper we present our research towards development of such a methodology, and show a pilot implementation to analysis of machine tool spindle. The methodology is based on Hubka's theory of design and AFD/TRIZ