ABSTRACT
Increased recognition of magnitude of the potential benefits of preventive maintenance (PM) has stimulated an interest in finding new and more efficient PM strategies. The idea of PM is that monitoring equipment status should permit the recognition of failure precursors and the corresponding opportunity for preventive intervention. The conceptual basis of "predictive maintenance" is the observation of the degradation process can provide warning of impending failure or advanced degradation so that a PM action may be performed and failure avoided. A primary research direction has been the use of reliability and cost measures to formulate predictive maintenance strategies. The simplest of the predictive maintenance analyses is the definition of a model for selecting inspection schedules. The predictive maintenance concept leads to two classes of analysis. In some cases, the extent of the deterioration can be directly observed. More often, the extent of device deterioration is not directly observable.
