An innovative approach for new distributed maintenance system: application to hydro power plants of the REMAFEX project

In most production units, the maintenance costs are commonly the major part of the operational cost. Moreover in these units, a bad maintenance can have serious consequences on product quality, equipment availability, environment, and therefore, on the company competitiveness. To face these facts, often resulting from an isolated maintenance activity, the maintenance has to be integrated with the control and the technical management islands, to provide the good information at the right time in the right place in order, first to upgrade the corrective action, and second to move to controlled maintenance. This paper aims at presenting a methodological approach to design a new solution of Distributed Maintenance System. The approach allows, firstly the integration of the maintenance in general through the concept of the Maintenance Focus Area; secondly, the definition of the pertinent Maintenance user requirements, and finally, the mapping from the requirements to the technological distributed Maintenance system by ensuring that the distributed system satisfies the required integrated Maintenance needs. In this approach, the use and the improvement, of information reference models, system theory, and diagnosis theories, allows to formalise the definition of maintenance requirements when current approaches are more empirical. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.