Improving Ship Maintenance: a Criticality and Reliability Approach

摘要

Ship maintenance has evolved through the years incorporating tools and techniques already applied in other industrial sectors. The obvious benefits from such an application include improved safety, environmental protection, asset integrity, minimisation of downtime and increased operability. In this paper, a predictive maintenance approach is described employing reliability and criticality analysis tools. Its application on the Diesel Generator (DG) system of a motor cruise ship is also presented. Well known tools such as Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) using static and dynamic gates together with reliability Importance Measures (IMs) are applied. The results of this research paper include the estimation of the reliability of the main system and sub-systems and the identification of their critical components as well as suggesting measures in order to prevent and/or mitigate the failures of the under-performing equipment.