Failure Mode Structured Preventive Maintenance Scheduling With Changing Failure Rates in Industry 4.0 Environment

Critical manufacturing systems consist of many different components working together. Each component is important to the operation and performance of the whole system. It is crucial to have a sound maintenance plan to ensure continuous production output. The strategy of current research is to focus on the failure mode modelling of the manufacturing system and divide it according to failure mode in production blocks. The preventive replacement intervals are determined using mean time to failure values of components, with group replacements of components within the production blocks to prevent unexpected functional breakdown failures. With the implementation of Industry 4.0 infrastructure, the mean time to failure values of components are constantly updated. The multi-mode mathematical model developed in this paper is able to adjust the preventive replacement schedule dynamically to suit changing system conditions. The results indicate that preventive replacement of components can achieve consistent minimum system reliability of 90% while minimizing system costs due to maintenance and downtime. Novelty of the approach lies in developing a holistic preventive maintenance schedule using failure mode and effects analysis for a complete system. The approach not only improves maintainability and reliability, lowers the cost of maintenance, but also keeps continuity of production.