Browsing by Author "Alabdulkarim, Abdullah A."
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Item Open Access Applications of simulation in maintenance research(World Academic Press, 2013-02-01) Alabdulkarim, Abdullah A.; Ball, Peter D.; Tiwari, AshutoshThe area of asset maintenance is becoming increasingly important as greater asset availability is demanded. This is evident in increasingly automated and more tightly integrated production systems as well as in service contracts where the provider is contracted to provide high levels of availability. Simulation techniques are able to model complex systems such as those involving maintenance and can be used to aid performance improvement. This paper examines engineering maintenance simulation research and applications in order to identify apparent research gaps. A systematic literature review was conducted in order to identify the gaps in maintenance systems simulation literature. The methodology applied identified peer- reviewed papers which were analysed for content and research direction. Simulation has been applied to model different maintenance sub-systems (asset utilisation, asset failure, scheduling, staffing, inventory, etc.) but these are typically addressed in isolation and overall maintenance system behaviour is poorly addressed, especially outside of the manufacturing systems discipline.Item Open Access Assessing asset monitoring levels for maintenance operations: a simulation approach(Emerald, 2015-10-31) Alabdulkarim, Abdullah A.; Ball, Peter D.; Tiwari, AshutoshPurpose – Asset management has recently gained significance due to emerging business models such as Product Service Systems where the sale of asset use, rather than the sale of the asset itself, is applied. This leaves the responsibility of the maintenance tasks to fall on the shoulders of the manufacturer/supplier to provide high asset availability. The use of asset monitoring assists in providing high availability but the level of monitoring and maintenance needs to be assessed for cost effectiveness. There is a lack of available tools and understanding of their value in assessing monitoring levels. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – This research aims to develop a dynamic modelling approach using Discrete Event Simulation (DES) to assess such maintenance systems in order to provide a better understanding of the behaviour of complex maintenance operations. Interviews were conducted and literature was analysed to gather modelling requirements. Generic models were created, followed by simulation models, to examine how maintenance operation systems behave regarding different levels of asset monitoring. Findings – This research indicates that DES discerns varying levels of complexity of maintenance operations but that more sophisticated asset monitoring levels will not necessarily result in a higher asset performance. The paper shows that it is possible to assess the impact of monitoring levels as well as make other changes to system operation that may be more or less effective. Practical implications – The proposed tool supports the maintenance operations decision makers to select the appropriate asset monitoring level that suits their operational needs. Originality/value – A novel DES approach was developed to assess asset monitoring levels for maintenance operations. In applying this quantitative approach, it was demonstrated that higher asset monitoring levels do not necessarily result in higher asset availability. The work provides a means of evaluating the constraints in the system that an asset is part of rather than focusing on the asset in isolation.Item Open Access Rapid modeling of field maintenance using discrete event simulation(2012-02-09T00:00:00Z) Alabdulkarim, Abdullah A.; Ball, Peter D.; Tiwari, AshutoshDiscrete event simulation has been applied to a wide range of applications areas due to its ability to represent stochastic systems over time. Maintenance, particularly field maintenance, is complex due to the interaction of different sub-systems of use, maintenance, repair and inventory and the conflicting demands of minimizing cost and maximizing availability. The area of simulation of maintenance systems receives little treatment in the literature and tends to focus on reliability modeling of individual assets. The work presented here documents research to fill this gap by specifying, creating and testing simulation functionality to rapidly model field maintenance systems.Item Open Access Simulation based optimization of joint maintenance and inventory for multi-components manufacturing systems(IEEE, 2014-01-27) Alrabghi, Abdullah; Tiwari, Ashutosh; Alabdulkarim, Abdullah A.Maintenance and spare parts management are interrelated and the literature shows the significance of optimizing them jointly. Simulation is an efficient tool in modeling such a complex and stochastic problem. In this paper, we optimize preventive maintenance and spare provision policy under continuous review in a non-identical multi-component manufacturing system through a combined discrete event and continuous simulation model coupled with an optimization engine. The study shows that production dynamics and labor availability have a significant impact on maintenance performance. Optimization results of Simulated Annealing, Hill Climb and Random solutions are compared. The experiments show that Simulated annealing achieved the best results although the computation time was relatively high. Investigating multi-objective optimization might provide interesting results as well as more flexibility to the decision maker.Item Open Access Understanding the effects of different levels of product monitoring on maintenance operations: A simulation approach(Cranfield University, 2013-10) Alabdulkarim, Abdullah A.; Ball, PeterThe move towards integrating products and services has increased significantly. As a result, some business models, such as Product Service Systems (PSS) have been developed. PSS emphasises the sale of use of the product rather than the sale of the product itself. In this case, product ownership lies with the manufacturers/suppliers. Customers will be provided with a capable and available product for their use. In PSS, manufacturers/suppliers are penalised for any down time of their product according to the PSS contract. This has formed a pressure on the service providers (maintenance teams) to assure the availability of their products in use. This pressure increases as the products are scattered in remote places (customer locations). Authors have urged that different product monitoring levels are applied to enable service providers to monitor their products remotely allowing maintenance to be performed accordingly. They claim that by adopting these monitoring levels, the product performance will increase. Their claim is based on reasoning, not on experimental/empirical methods. Therefore, further experimental research is required to observe the effect of such monitoring levels on complex maintenance operations systems as a whole which includes e.g. product location, different types of failure, labour and their skills and locations, travel times, spare part inventory, etc. In the literature, monitoring levels have been classified as Reactive, Diagnostics, and Prognostics. This research aims to better understand and evaluate the complex maintenance operations of a product in use with different levels of product monitoring strategies using a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) approach. A discussion of the suitability of DES over other techniques has been provided. DES has proven its suitability to give a better understanding of the product monitoring levels on the wider maintenance system. The requirements for simulating a complex maintenance operation have been identified and documented. Two approaches are applied to gather these generic requirements. The first is to identify those requirements of modelling complex maintenance operations in a literature review. This is followed by conducting interviews with academics and industrial practitioners to find out more requirements that were not captured in the literature. As a result, a generic conceptual model is assimilated. A simulation module is built through the Witness software package to represent different product monitoring levels (Reactive, Diagnostics, and Prognostics). These modules are then linked with resources (e.g. labour, tools, and spare parts). To ensure the ease of use and rapid build of such a complex maintenance system through these modules, an Excel interface is developed and named as Product Monitoring Levels Simulation (PMLS). The developed PMLS tool needed to be demonstrated and tested for tool validation purposes. Three industrial case studies are presented and different experimentations are carried out to better understand the effect of different product monitoring levels on the complex maintenance operations. Face to face validation with case companies is conducted followed by an expert validation workshop. This work presents a novel Discrete Event Simulation (DES) approach which is developed to support maintenance operations decision makers in selecting the appropriate product monitoring level for their particular operation. This unique approach provides numerical evidence and proved that the higher product monitoring level does not always guarantee higher product availability.