Maintenance Optimization for Complex Assets

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• Zhenglin Liang (Research Associate)
• Friday 04 March 2016, 10:00-10:45
• Seminar Room 1, IfM, 17 Charles Babbage Road.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Yongjiang Shi.

Zhenglin Liang from DIAL would like to share his research work on asset maintenance. Zhenglin finished his PhD in the last year.

“The reliability engineering community has been battling with the difficulty of modelling the complex behaviour of asset deterioration. One of the key research areas receiving increasing attention is to use mathematical models to capture the phenomenon of ageing dependence among components within multi-component assets. In a multi-component asset, a fault induced by a malfunctioned component may further propagate to other components, resulting in the accelerated deterioration of the asset. It is referred as fault propagation.”

“In my research, a two-layered approach is developed to mimic the deterioration of a multi-component asset with fault propagation. In the lower layer, the phenomenon of fault propagation is modelled using a vector-valued continuous-time Markov chain. In order to overcome the state space explosion problem that might arise when modelling this behaviour for complex multi-component assets, a novel partitioning algorithm for Markov aggregation is implemented to reduce the state-space. This results in a compact upper layer deterioration model. This model is then used to examine the impact of fault propagation on the failure time distribution and the expected lifetime of the asset. The results show that the fault propagation has a noteworthy impact on those two indicators. To alleviate the impact of fault propagation, a conditional fault mitigating maintenance model is designed to use fault preventive maintenance to mitigate the risk of fault propagation. It is seen that such a policy increases asset availability and lowers the operational cost of the asset. Simulated Annealing is employed to search for the optimised maintenance policy aimed at maximising availability and minimising operational cost.”

“The models developed are validated using a real case example of high-voltage power transformers. As a result, it is shown that the risk of fault propagation can be strategically mitigated in high-voltage power transformers. The model and the case study has the potential to stimulate the realization of other interesting applications and evoke awareness of the phenomenon of fault propagation, and provide asset managers with a more sophisticated maintenance strategy for multi-component assets.”

This talk is part of the Manufacturing Research Forum series.

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