This page is under development and will during the spring and summer of 2014 be subject to many changes.

TPK 5170 RAMS Assessment and Optimization

...adds new methods and skills to your RAMS toolbox of useful tools, methods, and models.

Brief background of course

This course is the specialization course in reliability, availability, maintenance and safety (RAMS) in the last fall semester of the (2 year) international master program in RAMS program and the (5 year) master program in Mechanical Engineering (in Norwegian: Produktdesign og Produksjon - PUP). The course is a continuation of RAMS methods with special emphasise on the application of methods, for example for the optimization of system design, operation, and maintenance. The course is part of the big envelope of courses given from the department of Production and Quality Engineering at NTNU, and it is lectured with personnel that belong to the RAMS group at this department. It is expected that the students already have taken (or have relevant background corresponding to):

• TPK 4120: Safety and Reliability
• TPK 4140: Maintenance Management 
• TPK 5160: Risk Analysis 

This course replaces the earlier arrangement with two specialization modules, one in risk and reliability and one in maintenance optimization (each with 3.75 credit points). The new (merged) course TPK 5170 therefore includes both subject areas: risik and reliability and maintenance optimization, and gives 7.5 credits (i.e., as a regular course normally does at NTNU).

It may be remarked that this course may, from the fall of 2015, change the name to "Asset management methods". A new course in "Reliability of safety-critical systems" may also be introduced. The course content may therefore change as a result of these changes. The changes will be available http://www.ntnu.edu/studies/courses, once implemented. The course responsible person in the fall of 2014 is Professor Mary Ann Lundteigen. I will also give about 50% of the lectures. This this is a specialization course, need the support of some "specialists" on certain topics. Some special topics will thererfore be lectured by Associate Professor Yiliu Liu and our new (at NTNU) Professor Anne Barros. As the course responsible, I will always be present in the lectures (with one or two exceptions) , also those not given by me.

Course objective and motivation

The main objective of this course is to increase the depth of understanding about RAMS methods.

Think about a system. A system will typically constitute many different parts and together they will perform many different functions. The system may be production critical, safety-critical, or even both. Safety systems may be mainly there to protect personnel from injury and death, or to protect the environment from severe damages. Railway signaling systems are one example of the first, and high pressure protection systems onboard an offshore facilitiy may be an example of the latter. Production-critical systems may, if they fail, cost "a whole lot", and have a severe effect on a manufacturer reputation, the quality of products developed, and the costs associated with correcting the system after failure. Critical infrastructures may be consideres as both production and safety-critical. Stable and safe public transportation, clean and stable water supply, power supply, and net supply are important for serving the society and business, and a failure of these could affect safety at a local level as well as at a national level.

Some key questions to ask in relation to such systems are shown in the figure below, and in many cases, they need to be solved using RAMS assessment and optimization methods.

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This means that methods already introduced in other courses are studied in more detail, with assistance of new application examples and new perspectives. Some new methods are also introduced so that the students, after having taken the course, will have a heavy weighted toolbox of methods to use in their future work tasks.  

Learning outcome

More specifically, the learning outcome should be:

Knowledge:
Basic insight into the theoretical foundation and practical applications of RAMS assessment and optimization. 

Skills:
Being able to identify and use framework and methods available to solve RAMS assessment and optimization tasks, and to select suitable methods for also more complicated situations. Solve optimization problems in practice. Assess RAMS performance for systems. 

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Topics lectured

Topics to be covered are as part of the course are (organized according to whether the application is mainly for safety-critical systems or production-critical systms, or both) presented below. Note that more than one lecture may be used to cover one particular topic. See the lecture plan for more details.

Reliability analyses of safety-critical systems

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• Partial and imperfect testing
• Follow-up of SIL requirements in the operational phase
• Hardware fault tolerance - Hardware design constraints of safety-critical functions

introduces some new methods, and makes a more thorough presentation of methods introduced in previous RAMS-related courses.

• Lecturer: Mary Ann Lundteigen
• The first lecture will be held on Tuesday August 19th 8:15-11:00  in VG13
• Course description is found here
• General information about the course (motivation, learning objectives, and related information) is found here
• The lecture plan for the entire semester is found here
• The time table is found here
• Textbook and course material are from:
  • Reliability of Safety-Critical Systems: Theory and Applications
  • Maintenance optimization lecture notes
  • Additional material will be uploaded on its' learning
• Information about tutorials and exercises is found here
• Exam: 
  • There will be a written exam. It is not allowed to bring any other material to this exam than a calculator and a table of formula (the latter is prepared during the semester by the lecturer)
  • More information about the exam is found here

Relevance:

• Some examples showing the relevance of this topic may be found with consultancy companies, such as with Safetec, Lloyd's Register Consulting, and DNV-GL (link to the GL-part of the services), and Lilleaker Consulting. Manufacturers like ABB, Siemens, AkerSolutions, FMC, Kongsberg Maritime and many more need to design systems in light of SIL requirements, and also demonstrate (sometimes with assistance of the consultancy companies) that the SIL requirements are met. End users, like railway service providers like Jernbaneverket, oil companies like Statoil, Det Norske, GDF-Suez, Shell and Conoco-Phillips among some, and owners of smelting plants, owners of water power stations must demonstrate that the SIL requirements continue to be met throughout the life of the systems.

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• Age, block and minimal repair strategies.

The intervals of maintenance for safety-critical systems are normally determined from the reliability analyses. For other systems, we may use decide upon intervals of testing using different maintenance strategies. These models include parameters like costs, failure rates, and aging. The models come of with the answer to the following two questions: When should we do maintenance and what tasks and equipment should be included. The application of these methods are many. Two examples are maintenance planning of railway tracks and another is planning of intervention (for maintenance purposes) of subsea equipment.

•  Modeling of effective failure rate:

Maintenance interval and and intervention level (extensiveness of maintenance) is obviously influencing the failure rate of the components. This topic concerns the modeling of the relationship between these two parameters and what we can refer to as the effective (or resulting) failure rate.

• Weibull renewal

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Tutorials

Reliability analyses:

Tutorials will focus on the application of lectured methods, and in particular comparing results of using different approaches. Two or three case studies will be introduced and used as basis for the problem solving. Matlab, Maple and Grif (the latter is a rather recent software for reliability assessment in use here at the NTNU) will be preferred to assist the reliability analyses.

Maintenance optimization: