Planned Maintenance Indicators

(1) Failure Frequency

“Failure frequency” denotes the incidence of failure as a percentage of loading time (the time during which the equipment is supposed to be operating). The “frequency” part of this term was borrowed from the discipline of safety management. The following formula expresses this index:

(2) MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)

MTBF is the average operating time between one failure and the next in repairable equipment.

(3) MTTF (Mean Time to Failure)

MTTF is the average operating time from startup to failure in the case of a component that is not repaired.

(4) Failure Severity

Like failure frequency, failure severity is also modelled on a term (in this case, “accident severity”). It denotes the proportion of time for which the equipment is down due to failure and is expressed by the following formula:

(5) MTTR (Mean Time to Repair)

MTTR, or the average time required for the breakdown maintenance of a piece of equipment, is expressed by the following formula:

(6) Availability

Availability is the proportion of time for which a repairable system or item of equipment is in a state in which it can fulfill its function within a given period. Mean availability (represented by the letter A) is often calculated using the following formula:

(where ‘uptime’ is when the equipment could have been working if it had not broken down).

Intrinsic Availability (At): indicates how unlikely a machine is to fail and how quickly it can be repaired if it does fail.

At = MTBF (MTBF + MTTR), where MTBF = mean time between failures, and MTTR = mean time to repair

Achievable Availability (Aa): indicates the length of the intervals between maintenance tasks and how quickly the maintenance tasks are done.

Aa = MTBM (MTBM + Mean), where MTBM = mean time between maintenance activities (including both preventive maintenance and breakdown maintenance) and Mean = mean maintenance time, i.e. the average time required to perform preventative maintenance and breakdown maintenance tasks).