Modularization in Maintenance – A New Paradigm

This thesis presents how modularization principles from product modularization can be applied in maintenance and how they induce significant cost reduction while ensuring that the need for maintenance is met. Considering asset-intensive industries, the importance of maintenance is increasing and is a critical factor that enables cost-efficient and safe operation of an asset. Over time, maintenance costs have been increasing; therefore, changing this tendency is imperative. In asset-intensive industries, assets can have more than 100.000 pieces of equipment all link together. This makes the maintenance job complex, case studies and literature show how today's methods for handling the complexity are not suited for the complexity and therefore it is hard to achieve optimal maintenance. This thesis aim to use modularization and product architecture to reduce maintenance complexity and to understand assets, the need for maintenance, and to choose the right method in a given situation. This thesis is based on 11 case studies that investigate how modularization in maintenance can benefit the maintenance operation. The 11 case studies also show how historical data can help achieve modularization and quantify the benefits. The results from the 11 cases are presented in nine papers. The nine papers present a series of tools and methods, all based on modularization principles that can be used to improve the current maintenance. Applying the tools and methods has shown cost reductions from 4% to 12%. Finally, this thesis present how modularization principles can be applied in maintenance and how a modular maintenance architecture can enable systematic optimization for maintenance and show how data can be structured and used to support the improvements. This is all lead to an overall framework that was developed based on the modular maintenance architecture built from historical data, which can change the way we consider maintenance today while creating a new maintenance paradigm based on modularization in maintenance.