Operational reliability evaluation-based maintenance planning for automotive production line

ABSTRACT

Reliability evaluation plays a critical role in upgrading the availability and productivity of automotive manufacturing industries by adopting the well-planned maintenance. Due to the lack of operation management studies in automotive industry, this paper addresses an operational reliability evaluation through failure behavior trend in an automotive production line. The main approaches for reliability analysis in this study include statistical structure and Monte Carlo simulation model. The statistical structure consists of three steps: data acquisition and homogenization process, validity of the trend hypothesis and parameters estimation. The reliability evaluation under statistical approach identified the main bottlenecks through the recognized behavior trend of system so that needs to be considered as a priority. Besides, K–R algorithm as Monte Carlo simulation was carried out to simulate reliability regarding failure distribution function. The result of Monte Carlo simulation with different iterations provides a high prediction accuracy of reliability with the lowest error. In addition, regarding the computed reliability through the proposed approaches and total expected cost, a reliability-based maintenance optimization model was conducted. The proposed maintenance intervals could be useful for improving the operational performance of critical components in automotive system.

KEYWORDS:

• Automotive industry
• reliability
• maintenance interval
• Monte Carlo simulation
• statistical structure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad [grant number 43956] and Iranian Automotive Industry (Iran Khodro Khorasan Co.).

Notes on contributors

Hamzeh Soltanali

Hamzeh Soltanali is a visiting researcher in the Division of Operation and Maintenance Engineering at Lulea University of Technology, Sweden. Also, He is a PhD. student in Reliability and maintenance engineering in the Department of Biosystems Engineering at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. His main research interests are in the area of Reliability analysis, Maintenance engineering, Risk and safety analysis, Sustainable development area (energy and environmental management). His works have been published in a variety of journals, including Journal of Risk and Reliability, International Journal for Interactive Design and Manufacturing, Energy, Journal of Cleaner Production, Neural Computing and Applications.

Abbas Rohani

Abbas Rohani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biosystems Engineering at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. He has obtained a Ph.D. in Maintenance management for process industries based on statistical and intelligent technique methods from the University of Tabriz, Iran. His main research interests are in the area of Statistical analysis, Maintenance management and reliability analysis, Data mining, Artificial intelligent application and Optimizations.

Mohammad Tabasizadeh

Mohammad Tabasizadeh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biosystems Engineering at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. His main research interests are in the area of Automotive industry, Maintenance management and Biosystems engineering

Mohammad Hossein Abbaspour-Fard

Mohammad Hossein Abbaspour-Fard is a full Professor in the Department of Biosystems Engineering at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM), Iran. He has obtained a Ph.D. in Agricultural Engineering (Biomaterials Handling Simulation) from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne (UK). He has been teaching and researching in the area of Agricultural Engineering with especial focus on Mechanization, maintenance and preventive service and repair of off road vehicles, since 1991 as a faculty member at the FUM. During this period, he has published dozens of articles on the aforementioned subjects in prestigious scientific journals and international conferences. He is currently pursuing his research activities through supervising several postgraduate students (M.Sc. and Ph.D.) in the area of "energy saving based maintenance and repair approaches" and also "adaptive renewable energy".

Aditya Parida

Aditya Parida is a Professor at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. He was an Indian Army Maintenance Engineer (Director/Colonel).Teaching Asset and Maintenance Engineering at Masters and PhD. level. Author of over a hundred papers, two books, three book chapters. Worked in eight EU, Swedish Government and industrial Research projects, like; Link & effect Model, Robustness for Railway, Key performance Measurement (KPI) study for an e-Maintenance Project for a Mine, developing a maintenance performance framework, etc.