A good maintenance strategy is the key to ensuring the longevity of a civil system. Maintenance strategies include a range of activities such as routine inspection, preventive maintenance, condition-based maintenance and corrective maintenance. These strategies are put in place to preserve or restore a civil system or an entire infrastructure to a state in which it can perform its required functions.
Maintenance strategies can have an important impact on a system for several reasons. An efficient strategy results in an efficient operating system, which can reduce cost and environmental impact by efficient use of resources. Another very important factor of maintenance is the safe keeping of civil systems for the user or people surrounded by the system. Therefore a good maintenance strategy is essential for managing civil systems.
Subsystem maintenance
If we look at each system isolated, every system has a unique maintenance schedule and actions. Bringing the systems together requires not only context of integration, but also synchronization of maintenance strategies. In order to do so we look at each system’s individual maintenance actions and frequency over its entire lifetime.
As we can see, the frequency of actions taken and the lifetime of each system differs a lot. To be able to develop a combined maintenance strategy, it is important to consider the limitations given by the systems. In our case the lifetimes of the wind turbine and the HVAC are the shortest with 25 years, which is why the maintenance schedule for the combined system has to be planned accordingly. Now the Maintenance actions are put together and result in a new intervention schedule over the combined systems lifetime.
We ranked the highest rated alternatives, split up in 30 groups. By using a Pareto Frontier we get a clear view of the best design options. As shown above, the best case scenario has a 6 year distance between repairs, while the worst case twice the amount in the same lifespan. With the results we can pick the best alternative suited for our system.
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