Strategic maintenance technique selection using combined quality function deployment, the analytic hierarchy process and the benefit of doubt approach

The business performance of manufacturing organizations depends on the reliability and productivity of equipment, machineries and entire manufacturing system. Therefore, the main role of maintenance and production managers is to keep manufacturing system always up by adopting most appropriate maintenance methods. There are alternative maintenance techniques for each machine, the selection of which depend on multiple factors. The contemporary approaches to maintenance technique selection emphasize on operational needs and economic factors only. As the reliability of production systems is the strategic intent of manufacturing organizations, maintenance technique selection must consider strategic factors of the concerned organization along with operational and economic criteria. The main aim of this research is to develop a method for selecting the most appropriate maintenance technique for manufacturing industry with the consideration of strategic, planning and operational criteria through involvement of relevant stakeholders. The proposed method combines quality function deployment (QFD), the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the benefit of doubt (BoD) approach. QFD links strategic intents of the organizations with the planning and operational needs, the AHP helps in prioritizing the criteria for selection and ranking the alternative maintenance techniques, and the BoD approach facilitates analysing robustness of the method through sensitivity analysis through setting the realistic limits for decision making. The proposed method has been applied to maintenance technique selection problems of three productive systems of a gear manufacturing organization in India to demonstrate its effectiveness

HSPIR: a manually annotated heat shock protein information resource

Heat shock protein information resource (HSPIR) is a concerted database of six major heat shock proteins (HSPs), namely, Hsp70, Hsp40, Hsp60, Hsp90, Hsp100 and small HSP. The HSPs are essential for the survival of all living organisms, as they protect the conformations of proteins on exposure to various stress conditions. They are a highly conserved group of proteins involved in diverse physiological functions, including de novo folding, disaggregation and protein trafficking. Moreover, their critical role in the control of disease progression made them a prime target of research. Presently, limited information is available on HSPs in reference to their identification and structural classification across genera. To that extent, HSPIR provides manually curated information on sequence, structure, classification, ontology, domain organization, localization and possible biological functions extracted from UniProt, GenBank, Protein Data Bank and the literature. The database offers interactive search with incorporated tools, which enhances the analysis. HSPIR is a reliable resource for researchers exploring structure, function and evolution of HSPs

A bibliographic review of trends in the application of ‘criticality’ towards the management of engineered assets

Increasing budgetary constraints have raised the hiatus for allocation of funding and prioritisation of investments to ensure that long established and new assets are in the condition to provide uninterrupted services towards progressive economic and social activities. Whereas a key challenge remains how to allocate resources to adequately maintain infrastructure and equipment, however, both traditional and conventional practices indicate that decisions to refurbish, replace, renovate, or upgrade infrastructure and/or equipment tend to be based on negativistic perceptions of criticality from the viewpoint of risk. For instance, failure modes, failure effects, and criticality analyses is well established and continues to be applied to resolve reliability and safety requirements for infrastructure and equipment. Based on a bibliographic review, this paper discusses trends in meaning, techniques and usage of the term ‘criticality’ in the management of engineered assets that constitute the built environment. In advocating the value doctrine for asset management, the paper proposes a positivistic application of criticality towards prioritisation of decisions to invest in the maintenance of infrastructure and equipment.The research work was performed within the context of SustainOwner ("Sustainable Design and Management of Industrial Assets through Total Value and Cost of Ownership"), a project sponsored by the EU Framework Programme Horizon 2020, MSCA-RISE-2014: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) (grant agreement number 645733 — Sustain-Owner — H2020-MSCA-RISE-2014