Towards structured integration of maintenance knowledge in industrial equipment design

Industrial equipment requires maintenance to remain operational. The level of maintenance that is required, and how easily it can be executed, is affected by the characteristics of the equipment. Therefore, design decisions have a strong influence on the effectiveness and efficiency of the maintenance process. Ideally, the design of the equipment should be aligned with the design of the maintenance service. Relevant knowledge about the relationships between them is available in both the literature and in practice. It is essential to bring this knowledge into the equipment design process, but suitable design support for this remains lacking. Therefore, we propose to conduct research on how this knowledge can be systematically integrated into the design process. The final goal of the research is to develop design support that leads to an improved quality of design decisions, so that production systems with an increased life cycle performance will be achieved.