Abstract:

The PAS55 is the standard, specified by the Institute of Assets Management (IAM) for the purpose of Assets Management, and it states the assets could be financial, physical, human, information etc., which have a distinct value to an organization. Here, our concern is to the physical assets, which include plants, buildings, machinery, equipment, vehicles or other items etc. Asset Management is the management of physical assets (their selection, maintenance, inspection, renewal or disposal) and plays a key role in determining the operational performance and profitability of industries that operate assets as part of their core business. Asset Management is an art and science of making the right decisions and optimising this process with an overall objective of minimising the whole life cost of assets but there can be other critical factors such as risk or business continuity in such a decision making. This necessitates a cross-disciplinary collaboration to achieve best net, sustained value-for-money in the selection, design/ acquisition, operations, maintenance and renewal/ disposal of physical infrastructure and equipment.

When a suggestion was made by the Guest editors of this special issue who have worked with the General Electric and other international concerns, it just seemed to be the right choice of the subject on which IJPE could bring out a special issue for the benefit of its readers. The result is before them to see. However our concern here was restricted to RAM’s activities that influence such management practices. The response to the call of papers to this special issue was overwhelming and we did receive as many as 16 papers and. out of these papers, eventually, eight papers were finally selected by the Guest Editors for the special issue after a long and competent review process. It is hoped that these would act as a catalyst for further interest and research in the area and more papers would be submitted in future to IJPE in this area.

The eight papers included in this special issue are from different areas of application, for example there is a paper on clustering of wind turbines for predicting the power output and for developing an optimal operational and maintenance strategy in an integrated manner. There is another paper from heavy heavy duty gas turbine operations, where the work reported in the paper is expected to help in the development of more sophisticated life prediction models for the gas turbine components for high performance. There is yet another paper on the reciprocating compressor, where optimization of opportunistic maintenance has been considered to minimize the life cycle costs.

We have another application from the mining equipment area, in which the effect of extreme environment is considered and maintenance strategy to counter the adverse effect of this environment under which the mining equipment works is presented to improve its overall performance. We have yet another paper from military aviation where the optimal maintenance strategy has been considered to improve the performance of the system.

There is a paper which presents the maintenance decision-making process for the case of a multi-component production unit based on output-based maintenance (OBM) technique. The OBM applies condition based maintenance (CBM) approach and uses machine output measure as the main monitoring parameter for maintenance decision making. Another paper presents the case study from machine tool area in which the CNC grinding machine operation and maintenance data is used to optimize machine tool configuration based on LCC, availability and overall equipment effectiveness. The last paper of this special issue provides a simple yet effective method for estimating the expected number of failures for large arrays of repairable units from an operational aircraft fleet. This is economically achieved and when more data is available, precision can be improved.

Thus the Guest Editors’ selection of papers has attempted to cover a wide range of applications and present case studies which make the Assets Management issue richer in contents.

It is sincerely hoped that this issue will generate further interest among our readers, who are looking for new approaches and new applications in the field of Assets Management.

Lastly, I would like to record my deep appreciation and sincere thanks to all the Guest Editors who laboriously worked to make this special issue possible. Particularly, the coordination task by Dr, B.K. Lad is highly appreciated. Thanks are also due to all the authors who contributed to this special issue and cooperated in maintaining the time schedule.