Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) refers to using robust sensing, monitoring, and control to detect, assess, and track system health degradation and failure modes, allowing for enhanced management and operational decisions. The need for PHM within a manufacturing facility has increased due to a variety of reasons, such as the increasing complexity of manufacturing equipment. A lack of readiness for digital implementations is linked to failure. The literature highlights certain barriers and enablers that can signal whether a technology implementation will be successful, such as management and maintenance employees’ desire to change the existing process, an understanding and willingness to take risks with technology, and having employees with the right competencies and motivations. This thesis identifies barriers and enablers related a successful PHM implementation and develops an assessment tool to identify a company’s readiness level as well as recommendations for increasing the probability of success.

A quasi-renewal process is more realistic in modeling the behavior of a repairable system than traditional models such as perfect repair and minimal repair since it reflects the deterioration process of the system over time while traditional models do not. The quasi-renewal parameter is set to a value between 0 and 1 to indicate the rate of deterioration. Moreover, a quasi-renewal process can also be used to model the increasing time of maintenance actions due to the increasing difficulty of maintaining an aging system by setting the parameter to a value larger than 1. We construct a model where the operating times follow a quasi-renewal process and the corrective/preventive maintenance times follow another quasi-renewal process. A quasi-renewal function and two equivalent point availability expressions are developed for the model described by a quasi-renewal process with and age-dependent preventive maintenance policy. In addition, numerical results from various theoretical distributions are obtained to illustrate the behavior of the models. The two equivalent point availability functions each contains an infinite sum and must be truncated to obtain a numerical approximation. The two approximated point availability functions form upper and lower bounds on the real value. The bounds are useful for determining the result accuracy, which can be arbitrarily increased by adding more terms to the truncated summation. Our framework provides a new time-dependent availability model for a non-stationary process with a preventive maintenance policy without any cost structure or optimization problem. / Ph. D.

In modern software development, maintenance accounts for the majority of the total cost and effort in a software project. Especially burdensome are those tasks which require applying a new technology in order to adapt an application to changed requirements or a different environment. This research explores methodologies, techniques, and approaches for automating such adaptive maintenance tasks. By combining high-level specifications and generative techniques, a new methodology shapes the design of approaches to automating adaptive maintenance tasks in the application domains of high performance computing (HPC) and enterprise software. Despite the vast differences of these domains and their respective requirements, each approach is shown to be effective at alleviating their adaptive maintenance burden. This thesis proves that it is possible to effectively automate tedious and error-prone adaptive maintenance tasks in a diverse set of domains by exploiting high-level specifications to synthesize specialized low-level code. The specific contributions of this thesis are as follows: (1) a common methodology for designing automated approaches to adaptive maintenance, (2) a novel approach to automating the generation of efficient marshaling logic for HPC applications from a high-level visual model, and (3) a novel approach to automatically upgrading legacy enterprise applications to use annotation-based frameworks. The technical contributions of this thesis have been realized in two software tools for automated adaptive maintenance: MPI Serializer, a marshaling logic generator for MPI applications, and Rosemari, an inference and transformation engine for upgrading enterprise applications. This thesis is based on research papers accepted to IPDPS '08 and OOPSLA '08. / Master of Science

Yes / This paper presents a study on selective maintenance for multi-state series-parallel systems with economically dependent components. In the selective maintenance problem, the maintenance manager has to decide which components should receive maintenance activities within a finite break between missions. All the system reliabilities in the next operating mission, the available budget and the maintenance time for each component from its current state to a higher state are taken into account in the optimization models. In addition, the components in series-parallel systems are considered to be economically dependent. Time and cost savings will be achieved when several components are simultaneously repaired in a selective maintenance strategy. As the number of repaired components increases, the saved time and cost will also increase due to the share of setting up between components and another additional reduction amount resulting from the repair of multiple identical components. Different optimization models are derived to find the best maintenance strategy for multi-state series-parallel systems. A genetic algorithm is used to solve the optimization models. The decision makers may select different components to be repaired to different working states based on the maintenance objective, resource availabilities and how dependent the repair time and cost of each component are. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. / Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Vietnam International Education Development (VIED)

Performance based contracting in the transportation arena is a rather recently implemented concept which has a few number of applications in the United States up to date. Nonetheless, the US Department of Transportation has vigorously promoted (by issuing memorandums to be distributed to the Highway Agencies and State Departments of Transportation) the conversion of traditional contracts to performance based contracts to reach a goal of 80% of the service contracts and actions being performance based by the end of fiscal year 2004 (Tomanelli 2003.) Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) has been one of the first state agencies that took the initiative of using a performance based contract for the maintenance of a portion of its interstate highway system. This initiative resulted in the establishment of the 'Comprehensive Agreement for Interstate Highway Asset Management Services' between VDOT and a private contractor in 1996 which resulted in the privatization of highway maintenance services. One of the important aspects of this contract related to this research is that it does not encompass any warranty clauses. In other words, the contractor does not provide any warranty to the VDOT for the services it is obligated to undertake. The contract is mute in this subject, making the contractor incur no liability for the underperformance of the maintenance activities. According to this research, this might lead to some cases which VDOT would not be willing to encounter. Just like performance based contracting, the use of warranties in highway contracts in the United States is a quite new concept which mainly dates back to 1995. There are different views possessed by different parties about the possible outcomes of implementing warranties in highway contracts. Nonetheless, this research proposes that the incorporation of warranty clauses into the VDOT issued performance based road maintenance contracts is vital to ensure the quality and durability of the work after the project completion. According to this research, warranty clauses, if developed carefully, give the contractor the motivation to implement superior maintenance practices to improve the overall conditions of the assets during the contract period. This is done in order to lengthen the life of each asset item and achieve the long term performance. Ultimately, the incorporation of warranty clauses is believed to reduce the risk imposed upon VDOT. Within the context of the discussion presented above, this research first illustrates that the complete satisfaction of one of the parties (VDOT) may be in question due to the absence of the warranty clauses within the contract, then lists and explores the benefits that would/may be gained by the incorporation of warranty clauses into the contract, and finally develops a warranty clause template and proposes it to be used in the future performance based road maintenance contracts issued by VDOT. At the bottom line, this study aspires to help the party in question (VDOT) to reduce the risk imposed upon it and to improve the future performance based road maintenance contracts it will issue. This research uses the VDOT contract as a baseline to define the problem and to propose a solution (i.e. the developed warranty clause template) for that. Nonetheless, some of the principles and approaches used during the development of the warranty clause template can also be referred to for the development of warranty clauses for the performance based road maintenance contracts issued by the other state DOTs. / Master of Science

Reliable and efficient utilization and operation of any engineering asset require carefully designed maintenance planning and maintenance related data in the form of failure times, repair times, Mean Time between Failure (MTBF) and conditioning data etc. play a pivotal role in maintenance decision support. With the advancement in data analytics sciences and industrial artificial intelligence, maintenance related data is being used for maintenance prognostics modeling to predict future maintenance requirements that form the basis of maintenance design and planning in any maintenance-conscious industry like railways. The lack of such available data creates a no. of different types of problems in data driven prognostics modelling. There have been a few methods, the researchers have employed to counter the problems due to lack of available data. The proposed methodology involves data augmentation technique using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Simulation to enhance maintenance data to be used in maintenance prognostics modeling that can serve as basis for better maintenance decision support and planning.

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Text in Afrikaans, abstract in Afrikaans and English / Die nie-nakoming van onderhoudsbevele is 'n universele problem. Wereldwyd word daar gedurig pogings aangewend om by wyse van wetgewing effektiewer afdwinging van onderhoudsbevele te bewerkstellig. Op 1 Maart 1992 het die wetgewer hier te lande 'n aantal nuwe maatreels vir hierdie doel beliggaam in die Wysigingswet op Onderhoud, 2 van 1991, wat op genoemde datum in werking getree het. 'n Ondersoek is gedoen by die Johannesburgse Landdroshof waar 'n studie gemaak is van 2,248 afgehandelde sake en strek oor die periode 1Maart 1992 tot 31Augustus1995. Die ondersoek bring aan die lig dat die bepalings van genoemde Wysigingswet op Onderhoud, wat gerig is op effektiewer afdwinging van onderhoudsbevele, nie 'n noemenswaardige verbetering in effektiewer afdwinging van hierdie bevele in die praktyk tot gevolg gehad het nie. Dit blyk dat die meeste howe geneig is om belangrike afdwingingsmeganismes soos besoldigingsbeslag bevele en lasbriewe vir eksekusie oor die hoof sien. Kritiek word uitgespreek op sommige van hierdie bepalings en voorstelle word gemaak hoe relatiewe geringe wysigings daaraan effektiewer afdwinging van onderhoudsbevele kan bewerkstellig. Daar word kortliks verwys na die afdwinging van onderhoudsbevele in antler regstelsels en hoe hulle poog om effektiewer afdwinging van onderhoudsbevele te bewerkstellig. / The ineffective enforcement of maintenance orders appears to be a world wide phenomenon. Legislators here and aboard are always attempting to improve the effectiveness of maintenance collection and enforcement methods. Research done at the Johannesburg Magistrate's Court involving 2,248 cases covering the period 1 March 1992 to 31 August 1995 reveals that the Maintenance Amendment Act, 2 of 1991, which is aimed at improving the enforcement of maintenance orders had a negligible effect on enforcement mechanisms used by the courts. It appears that most courts are inclined to overlook important collection methods such as garnishee and attachment orders. Criticism is levelled at certain provisions contained in the Maintenance Act, 23 of 1963, as amended. Suggestions are made how relatively simple amendments would contribute to more effective enforcement of maintenance orders. A brief survey is made of attempts by some Western countries to improve the manner of maintenance collection. / Private Law / LL. M. (Law)

M. Tech. Business Administration / The research reviews how the implementation of total productive maintenance (TPM), as a maintenance strategy, can be adopted at DCD Wind Towers (Pty) Ltd., a wind tower manufacturing company in South Africa. It also focuses on maintenance management programmes, identifies obstacles, barriers and challenges to the implementation of maintenance management programmes.