Development of an optimized condition-based maintenance system by data fusion and reliability-centered maintenance

Maintenance has gained in importance as a support function for ensuring equipment availability, quality products, on-time deliveries, and plant safety. Cost-effectiveness and accuracy are two basic criteria for good maintenance. Reducing maintenance cost can increase enterprise profit, while accurate maintenance action can sustain continuous and reliable operation of equipment. As instrumentation and information systems become cheaper and more reliable, condition-based maintenance becomes an important tool for running a plant or a factory. This paper presents a novel condition-based maintenance system that uses reliability-centered maintenance mechanism to optimize maintenance cost, and employs data fusion strategy for improving condition monitoring, health assessment, and prognostics. The proposed system is demonstrated by way of reasoning and case studies. The results show that optimized maintenance performance can be obtained with good generality.