Title: Maintenance Metrics
Course: Manufacturing Analytics (ATE Central) > Section: Module 3 - Preventative Maintenance

Introduction

Predictive maintenance uses data analysis to anticipate failures and optimize maintenance. Key metrics like failure rate, reliability, MTTF, and MTBF help minimize downtime and improve efficiency. By analyzing failure data and using visual tools like Matplotlib, teams can identify trends and schedule maintenance proactively.

Objectives

- Identify the definitions of failure rate, reliability, and availability in predictive maintenance.
- Calculate and interpret MTTF and MTBF to assess equipment health.
- Analyze historical failure data to identify trends and optimize maintenance.
- Use Matplotlib to visualize failure patterns and support proactive maintenance.

Maintenance Metrics

A foundational concept in predictive maintenance is the failure rate, which refers to the rate at which equipment or components fail over time. Understanding the failure rate is crucial for predicting when maintenance should be performed to prevent unplanned downtime. By analyzing historical data on equipment failures, maintenance teams can determine the failure rate and identify patterns or trends that may indicate impending failures.

Reliability is another key concept in predictive maintenance, representing the probability that a piece of equipment will operate without failure for a certain period under specified conditions. Reliability is closely related to the concept of availability, which measures the percentage of time that equipment is operational and available for production. Predictive maintenance aims to maximize equipment reliability and availability by identifying and addressing potential failure risks before they lead to unplanned downtime.

Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) is a metric used to estimate the average time until a piece of equipment fails. MTTF provides valuable insight into equipment reliability and helps maintenance teams plan maintenance activities more effectively. This metric is looked at over an entire factory or production line.

MTTF

MTTF = total number of operation time units (sec/min/hours) / total number of assets

Mean time between failures (MTBF) is the average time between system breakdowns. Mean time between failures is a crucial maintenance metric to measure performance, safety, and equipment design, especially for critical or complex assets in manufacturing. This metric is looked at over a single piece of equipment.

MTBF

MTBF = total number of operation time units (sec/min/hours) / total number of failures

By monitoring equipment health and analyzing data on MTTF or MTBF, maintenance teams can schedule maintenance tasks proactively, minimizing the risk of unexpected failures and optimizing equipment uptime.

This section uses the following imports:

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.plot()

plt.show()

Sometimes a visualization is the easiest way to identify patterns. In this section, you will use matplotlib, a library used to create quick visualizations in Python, to quickly create line graphs to look for patterns to explain why one machine is failing and the other is not.