Research about New Predictive-Maintenance Methodology using VBA for Marine Engineering Applications

Abstract

Applications and Experiences of Quality Control 398 to solve his particular working problems at the ship or in a power station, he cannot depend on licenses and private software-related problems that can stop his activity. Consequently, engineers must apply programming languages to develop their own applications in accordance with the particular conditions of each engine room (Cebi et al., 2009; Deris et al., 1999). Therefore, programming languages, such as FORTRAN, Pascal and C, are not appropriate for marine engineers who must work on-site with limited resources, in contrast to the work spot of a general engineer. As a result of previous research works and meetings with experienced marine engineers and companies, the researchers of the Department of Energy and Marine Propulsion have concluded that the programming software must be user-friendly and must not be too heavy for the computers of the power station. Furthermore, it must be borne in mind that a marine engineer hardly ever stays in the same ship or power station; accordingly, he must be ready to start his work from scratch within a limited period of time. From previous experiences in thermodynamic studies (Orosa, 2009), researchers have analysed the principal computing software resources, such as C, Matlab, Mathematica, Engineering Equation Solver or EES, Pascal, FORTRAN and Visual Basic. From their research, they conclude that Visual Basic for applications (VBA) is the best solution for these typical engineering problems. Microsoft (MS) VBA is a very simple language to converse with Excel, a user-friendly programming language that can be easily used by engineers who are interested in and ready to spend some time in a very rewarding and enabling learning process. People who use applications that host VBA can automate and extend the application functions, thereby shortening the development cycle of customising engineering solutions (VBA, 2009; Verma, 2003; Verhoefa et al., 2008). The only problem related with this language is that sufficient information is not available about VBA. Consequenly, researchers of the Department of Energy and Marine Propulsion, in collaboration with the Department of Informatics, began a self-learning process involving VBA to define a new methodology for marine engineers, which allows them reduce the time elapsed when they carry out maintenance studies at work. In particular, this chapter presents a deeper study to generate a software resource to generate a control chart of attributes and, thereby, derive a research tool for a faster qualitycontrol study, based on the results obtained and not by the calculation process. As explained, VBA has been selected because of its macro programming system that can be implemented with MS Excel (Wu and Liua, 2008).