Selecting Suitable Candidates for Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance (PdM) or Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) assists in better predicting the future state of physical assets and making timely and better-informed maintenance decisions. Many companies nowadays ambition the implementation of such an advanced maintenance policy. However, the first step in any implementation of PdM is identifying the most suitable candidates (i.e. systems, components). This is to assess where PdM would provide the greatest benefit in performance and costs of downtime. Although multiple selection methods are available, these methods do not always lead to the most suitable candidates for PdM. The main reason is that these methods mainly focus on critical components without considering the clustering of maintenance, and the technical, economic, and organizational feasibility. This paper proposes a three-stage funnel-based selection method to enhance this process. The first step of the funnel helps to significantly reduce the number of suitable systems or components by a traditional filtering on failure frequency and impact on the firm. In the second and third step, a more in-depth analysis on the remaining candidates is conducted. These steps help to filter potential showstoppers and study the technical and economic feasibility of developing a specific PdM approach for the selected candidates. Finally, the proposed method is successfully demonstrated using two distinct cases: a vessel propulsion system and a canal lock.