This page is under development and will during the spring and summer of 2014 be subject to many changes.
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 RAMS program and the (5 year) 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.
Course objective and content
The main objective of this course is to increase the depth of understanding of RAMS methods. 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.
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.
General competence:
Understand RAMS as an important cornerstone of industrial and commercial systems and in the public administration.
Topics to be covered are: How to define requirements for safety systems and barriers, and how to assess the reliability of safety instrumented systems with background in IEC 61508 and related standards. This includes SIL allocation, risk acceptance criteria, requirements for design of technical and operational barriers, alternative strategies for treatment of common cause failures, various methods for determining proof test intervals, and trade off between safety and regularity. Within maintenance optimization the following topics are covered: Age, block, and minimal repair policies. Optimisation of intervals and intervention level in condition monitoring models. Optimum grouping of maintenance activities. Spare part optimisation. Reliability Centred maintenance. Data collection and analysis. In relation to technical safety we study how the result from the risk analysis may be utilized to assess the effect of various safety system configurations, and combination of these under various constraints.