MSc Reliability Engineering and Asset Management / Course details

This course unit detail provides the framework for delivery in 20/21 and may be subject to change due to any additional Covid-19 impact.  Please see Blackboard / course unit related emails for any further updates.

Any organization that relies on plant and equipment to generate products and/or services to its customers’ needs to invest in equipment and ensure that that the equipment performs reliably for the required time. This is usually achieved through the implementation of asset management and maintenance activities. The cost-effective execution of these activities significantly depends on the implementation of a strategy. Once the appropriate strategy is developed, a suitable organisation has to be put in place to implement the strategy and plans.

Explain the purpose of asset management & maintenance within an organisation
¿ Review the historical development of maintenance principles and techniques
¿ Review the historical development of asset management principles & techniques
¿ Show how a structured and logical approach to the formulation of an all-embracing strategy for maintaining complex industrial plant can be developed
¿ Show how a structured and logical approach to the formulation of an asset management strategy can be developed for any industry
¿ Show how an asset management organisation & a maintenance organisation can be mapped and modelled
¿ Identify key decisions that define the structure and operation of asset management & maintenance organisations
¿ Outline the business trends in asset management & maintenance organisations over the last thirty years

Plant acquisition policy and life cycle costs
¿ A methodology for understanding the maintenance function
¿ Modelling industrial plant by process flow diagrams
¿ Maintenance objectives and decision making
¿ Principles of preventive maintenance; definition of a plant item; maintainability diagrams
¿ Models for optimising the balance of preventive and corrective work
¿ Definitions of operate to failure; fixed time maintenance; condition-based maintenance
¿ Selection of the best maintenance procedure in the light of cost, safety factors and how the equipment fails
¿ Assembling the maintenance tasks into a complete life plan for a unit or system
¿ Producing a balanced forward maintenance plan from all of these unit life plans
¿ The top down and bottom up approach to formulating a maintenance strategy
¿ Principles behind Reliability Centred Maintenance & Total Productive Maintenance
¿ Industrial case studies
¿ Assessing the risks from equipment failures
¿ Life cycle costing
¿ Developing asset strategies from business requirements
¿ Linking asset policies & strategies to plans
¿ Leadership, communication & culture
¿ Continuous improvement
¿ Implications of out-sourcing different activities
¿ Main types of asset management & maintenance organisations & drivers for them

Provided in person or via the Blackboard system.