Model of preventive maintenance, reliability and replacement analysis

The main objective of this research is the development of a model that combines reliability engineering analysis with cost accounting techniques, for the automation of maintenance data analysis. A maintenance engineer will be able to estimate the time to schedule the next preventive maintenance, for any repairable system under consideration before failure occurs. The model performs replacement analysis between the system and similar equipment in order to select an alternative based on the reliability and maintenance history. This work develops the handling of the mathematical procedures and the analysis of statistical tests. A case study to apply the developed model uses the automotive environment. Because of the integration of the reliability and cost analysis under the same computer based model, a maintenance plan is derived considering the failure history of the equipment.