Spare parts estimation for machine availability improvement addressing its reliability and operating environment - Case study

Industrial operation cost analysis shows that, in general, maintenance represents a significant proportion of the overall operating costs. Therefore, the improvement of maintenance follows the final goal of any company, namely, to maximize profit. This paper studies spare parts availability, an issue of the maintenance process, which is an important way to improve production through increased availability of functional machinery and subsequent minimization of the total production cost. Spare parts estimation based on machine reliability characteristics and operating environment is performed. The study uses an improved statistical-reliability (S-R) approach which incorporates the system/machine operating environment information in systems reliability analysis. For this purpose, two methods of Poisson process and renewal process are introduced and discussed. The renewal process model uses a multiple regression type of analysis based on Cox's proportional hazards modeling (PHM). The parametric approaches with baseline Weibull hazard functions and time-independent covariates are considered, and the influence of operating environment factors on this model is analyzed. The outputs represent a significant difference in the required spare parts estimation when considering or ignoring the influence of the relevant system operating environment. The difference is significant in the sense of spare parts forecasting and inventory management which can enhance the parts and consequently machine availability, leading to economical operation and savings.