Opportunistic maintenance based on fuzzy modelling of component proximity

Conventional maintenance strategies on a single component are being phased out in favor of more predictive maintenance actions. These new forms of maintenance are emerging today for better controlling the global performances of the whole system all along its life cycle. They are anticipative in nature allowing developing non-already-planned maintenance actions or to move earlier or later a planned maintenance action. It leads to investigate opportunistic interventions by considering, for example, the direct environment of a given component to be maintained in order to run additional maintenance actions on other components considered enough closed (proximity principle). Thus, this paper presents a new fuzzy methodology to assess component proximity in the design phase to impact design out maintenance. The methodology is applied on an industrial case study.