Why “the one” perfect maintenance strategy does not exist
A good maintenance strategy aims at predicting fault events, allowing for a maintenance intervention before
these occur, and thus before machine failure. The operator can therefore prepare for planned downtime of the
machine, gather required tools and replacement parts ahead, as well as instruct the staff in time.
So, why doesn’t every company rely on “predictive maintenance,” which is the ultimate maintenance dream?
Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy to forecast fault events in highly complex technical systems, as such
strategies merely make a good or very good prediction for at most one in ten potential causes of defect.
Predictive maintenance is the perfect candidate for these kinds of causes, as the predictability rate of other
maintenance events is too low. A typical example of this would be the line fault, one of the most occurring
fault events in highly connected systems. It can be caused by a short circuit, a line break, or an open plug,
among other things. However, these causes of defect don’t exhibit any signs of failure beforehand, nor are they
otherwise predicable. Since they still need to be detected and corrected, it is best to adopt customized
maintenance strategies.
What is an event in a
technical system?
An event is a real cause of defect that affects the normal functioning of a technical system. To better understand causes of defect in technical systems, the resulting events can be grouped broadly into
categories based on common characteristics.
