An innovative approach for new distributed maintenance system: applicationto hydro power plants of the REMAFEX project

In most production units, the maintenance costs are commonly the major part of the operational cost. Moreover in these units, a bad maintenance can ha ve serious consequences on product quality, equipment availability, environ ment, and therefore, on the company competitiveness. To face these facts, o ften resulting from an isolated maintenance activity, the maintenance has t o be integrated with the control and the technical management islands, to p rovide the good information at the right time in the right place in order, first to upgrade the corrective action, and second to move to controlled ma intenance. This paper aims at presenting a methodological approach to desig n a new solution of Distributed Maintenance System. The approach allows, fi rstly the integration of the maintenance in general through the concept of the Maintenance Focus Area; secondly, the definition of the pertinent Maint enance user requirements, and finally, the mapping from the requirements to the technological distributed Maintenance system by ensuring that the dist ributed system satisfies the required integrated Maintenance needs. In this approach, the use and the improvement, of information reference models, sy stem theory, and diagnosis theories, allows to formalise the definition of maintenance requirements when current approaches are more empirical. (C) 19 99 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.