Reliability engineering and maintenance
A product’s reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS) are quality characteristics to which customers attach great importance when forming an opinion of the product’s overall quality. It is especially important to understand that these are precisely the characteristics whose design flaws cannot be fixed during manufacturing or operation. In fact it is in the product design phase where the fundamental decisions are made to set the product’s maximum quality and minimum cost. A company that has good control of the RAMS performance of its products has a considerable competitive advantage both in the case of design and manufacturing consumer products and when negotiating availability contracts for large industrial systems.
The reasearch group of reliability engineering and maintenance has produced design methods, simulation models and software to integrate the aspects of RAMS into the product and service design and development process. The research work has been carried out together with Finnish companies and Finnish Defense Forces. The participating companies are producers and users in metal, energy, pulp and paper, and electronics industries. Their products and systems have to meet high safety and reliability demands. Based on the experience, and with the help of the methods, it is possible to find out those problem areas during the design stage which can reduce product reliability and safety, and increase the product life-cycle costs, and delay product development. The design models developed in the research projects enable informed decision making by providing explicit analysis of the impact of different design solutions and investments as a function of the following factors:
- product price and life-cycle costs
- product reliability and maintainability performance and maintenance costs
- product warranty duration, terms and costs
- customer satisfaction, sales and profit
Probabilistic modeling and stochastic simulation have been the main tools in the area of reliability engineering and maintenance. Research themes are among other things pricing of warranty and maintenance service contracts, and related risk assessment. The problems have arisen from numerous industrial research projects, and the provided solutions have usually been mathematical models and methods, as well as large computer-aided calculation and simulation schemes.
General research topics
- Development of probabilistic methods for advanced life-cycle engineering
- Probabilistic risk assessment and management
- Modeling and analysis of cause-consequence logic of failures
- Specification and allocation of reliability, availability and maintenance cost requirements
- Simulation and calculation of reliability performance and maintenance costs
- Evaluation of preventive maintenance impact on failure probability
- Development of simulation models for optimization of maintenance strategy and asset management
- Design and Risk management of basic and extended warranty and maintenance contracts
- Risk evaluation of a spare part stock by stochastic simulation
- Identification and evaluation of investment needs based on the operation efficiency and life-cycle cost simulation
- Service and repair process development
Current research topic
Development of probabilistic methods for innovative product-service design, where information and communication technology (ICT) is integrated to products, and intelligent maintenance systems (IMS) are applied to risk assessment and life cycle management of products.