Fuzzy criticality assessment for process equipments maintenance

Criticality-based maintenance (CBM) is a prioritized approach to the maintenance of (industrial) process equipment. CBM requires personnel with a thorough knowledge of the process/equipment under scrutiny. In this paper a criticality assessment system that is implemented by a local company (which represents the expertise and knowledge of the company experts) is reviewed and fuzzy logic theory is applied to improve the system´s capability and reliability. The quality of the fuzzy system is evaluated based on several case studies. The results show that the fuzzy logic based system does not only what the conventional system does, but also outperforms in terms of reliability and has a unique ranking capability.