Computer-aided RCM-based plant maintenance management system

In most of the industries, classical reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is employed to decide the maintenance strategies using reliability data without having adequate interaction with the design and operational systems. This means that the RCM process will be conducted with no or limited access to the design and operational data/knowledge. Commonly, the developed maintenance strategies are implemented and managed within the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), which is usually separate from the RCM automated environment. This paper presents the detailed system design and mechanism of improved RCM process as integrated with CMMS. The proposed solution is integrated with design and operational systems and consolidates some successful maintainability approaches to formulate an effective solution for optimized plant maintenance. The major components of the enhanced RCM process are identified and a prototype system is implemented as integrated with the various modules of the adopted CMMS (MAXIMO(TM)). A case study is used to show the effectiveness of the proposed RCM-based CMMS solution in optimizing plant maintenance over the traditional approaches. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.