Fuzzy Approach for Maintainability Evaluation in the Design Process

Abstract

The maintainability aspect of some complex products has a significant role during the life cycle; it is the design attribute determining the performance of various maintenance activities such as: inspection, diagnosis, repair, and replacement. If a product has poor maintainability, the maintenance activities which have to be performed on it during its life cycle are difficult, increasing the costs, and also the time required to accomplish the maintenance tasks. An early evaluation of maintainability during the design process may help the designers to make educated design choices, also from the maintenance point of view. In this article, we present a maintainability evaluation approach based on fuzzy logic; fuzzy linguistic variables are employed in order to represent and handle the design data available early in the design process. The main reason for employing fuzzy logic principles for maintainability evaluation is the imprecision and uncertainty generally characterizing the design data available at the beginning of the design process, when design specifications and requirements are subject to change and the description of the design is incomplete. The measure of the product maintainability or maintainability index might be expressed by a fuzzy numerical value computed as the weighted mean of the criteria values used for the evaluation.

Maintenance Process Simulation Based Maintainability Evaluation by Using Stochastic Colored Petri Net

“…Tjiparuro et al [12] studied the elements and attributes that will affect system maintainability according to previous research efforts, and a maintainability analysis approach is proposed in terms of functional design and maintainability axioms for the conceptual design. Slavila et al [13] applied the fuzzy theory to study the maintainability evaluation, and design variables are expressed by linguistic variables in their methods. Desai and Mital [14] addressed the effect of human factors in maintainability design and presented a comprehensive design to improve the maintainability of products.…”

“…The second is the process based method [4][5][6][7], the maintenance process is modeled to support task demonstration in these methods. The last is the multiple attribute decision based method [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19], different kinds of attributes are considered and maintainability deficiencies can be discovered with these methods.…”

Using of A’wot to Design an Enhanced Planned Maintenance System (E-Pms) on-Board Ship

“…Hubka and Eder [1] argue that managing the design considerations with the manufacturing and ergonomic properties, economic issues, functional and operational properties such as operational safety, maintainability, reliability, operating costs, are critical parameters to be able to ensure economic lifecycle and service period of overall system or performance of its components in desired levels. Among the design considerations, maintainability characteristics and maintenance facilitates are significant phenomena in terms of managing design and operation process of complex technical systems in an efficient manner [2][3][4][5][6].…”

A New Method for Aircraft Maintainability Allocation

“…One study by Coulibaly [18] proposed an improvement of the maintainability indicators such as the disassembly time and the replacement time of failed components and a behavioral performance engineering algorithm for complex product families at the early design stage. To determine effect of artificial intelligence methods on maintainability Slavia [19] provided maintainability evaluation approach based on fuzzy logic in order to represent and handle the design data available early in the design process. Similarly, Zhong [20] proposed a maintainability fuzzy evaluation for airplane landing gears.…”