Originally published as The Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering Volume 11 Number 2, 2005
ISBN: 1 84544 155 9
Guest edited by: Prof. Abdelhakim Artiba, Ecole de Technologie Supe´rieure, Canada & Fouad Riane, Catholic University of Mons (FUCaM), Belgium.
Maintenance is as an essential factor that can lead to the reduction of "inefficiencies" and has to be considered as a well-established Enterprise Domain and as a profit centre.
The development of optimized maintenance strategies may have great impacts not only on the equipment availability and cost optimization, but also on the product quality, environment protection, human safety, energy control, zero waste and enterprise strategy.
This Special Issue is dedicated to research papers dealing with maintenance issues. It includes four papers meticulously selected from the 6th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Production Management (IEPM’03)
Contents:
Joint optimal periodic and conditional maintenance strategy
In this paper, an optimal periodic replacement strategy is proposed. The authors employ mathematical models to investigate the expected cost rate and the steady state availability with illustrative examples.
To maintain or not to maintain? What should a risk-averse decision maker do?
In real-life applications maintenance managers often face complicated decision problems under uncertainty. This difficulty increases when they have to take conflicting objectives into account. This paper aims to deal with a single component system that has to accomplish a series of missions of a given length.
Optimal design of series production lines with unreliable machines and finite buffers
The purpose of this paper is to formulate a new problem of the optimal design of a series manufacturing production line system, and to develop an efficient heuristic approach to solve it. The optimal design objective is to maximize the efficiency subject to a total cost constraint.
Artificial neural networks for reliability maximization under budget and weight constraints
The purpose of this paper is to apply a recent kind of neural networks in a reliability optimization problem for a series system with multiple-choice constraints incorporated at each subsystem, to maximize the system reliability subject to the system budget and weight.
Appraisal of farm tractor maintenance practices and costs in Nigeria
The purpose of this paper is to investigate tractor maintenance practices and costs in Nigeria with a view to making replacement decisions and for overall farm budgeting.
Reliability and operating environment-based spare parts estimation approach: A case study in Kiruna Mine, Sweden
A model is provided in this paper to determine the number of required spare parts with respect to the effect of the external factors, except time, on the reliability characteristics of components through the proportional hazard model.
About The Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering
Until the launch of The Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering in 1995, the body of published knowledge on maintenance had been scattered over a wide range of journals.
Covering all aspects of quality in maintenance, from both academic and practical perspectives, The Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering shows you how the maintenance function can be made more reliable, more cost-effective and more efficient. By bringing the latest research findings to the notice of academics and practitioners, it makes a significant contribution to the achievement of total quality.
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