Failure analysis of engineering systems with preventive maintenance and failure interactions

Optimal operation and maintenance of engineering systems heavily rely on the accurate prediction of their failures. Most engineering systems, especially mechanical systems, are susceptible to failure interactions. These failure interactions can be estimated for repairable engineering systems when determining optimal maintenance strategies for these systems. An extended Split System Approach is developed in this paper. The technique is based on the Split System Approach and a model for interactive failures. The approach was applied to simulated data. The results indicate that failure interactions will increase the hazard of newly repaired components. The intervals of preventive maintenance actions of a system with failure interactions, will become shorter compared with scenarios where failure interactions do not exist.

Development of a Systematic Approach to Assessing Quality within Australian Residential Aged Care Facilities: The Clinical Care Indicators Tool

Recent years have seen the introduction of formalised accreditation processes in both community and residential aged care, but these only partially address quality assessment within this sector. Residential aged care in Australia does not yet have a standardised system of resident assessment related to clinical, rather than administrative, outcomes. This paper describes the development of a quality assessment tool aimed at addressing this gap. Utilising previous research and the results of nominal groups with experts in the field, the 21-item Clinical Care Indicators (CCI) Tool for residential aged care was developed and trialled nationally. The CCI Tool was found to be simple to use and an effective means of collecting data on the state of resident health and care, with potential benefits for resident care planning and continuous quality improvement within facilities and organisations. The CCI Tool was further refined through a small intervention study to assess its utility as a quality improvement instrument and to investigate its relationship with resident quality of life. The current version covers 23 clinical indicators, takes about 30 minutes to complete and is viewed favourably by nursing staff who use it. Current work focuses on psychometric analysis and benchmarking, which should enable the CCI Tool to make a positive contribution to the measurement of quality in aged care in Australia.

In the Rough : In-Field evaluation of an autonomous vehicle for golf course maintenance

Maintenance is a time consuming and expensive task for any golf course or driving range manager. For a golf course the primary tasks are grass mowing and maintenance (fertilizer and herbicide spreading), while for a driving range mowing, maintenance and ball collection are required. All these tasks require an operator to drive a vehicle along paths which are generally predefined. This paper presents some preliminary in-field tsting results for an automated tractor vehicle performing golf ball collection on an actual driving range, and mowing on difficult unstructured terrain.

A naturalistic inquiry of registered nurses' perspectives and expectations of psychodynamic therapeutic care in acute psychiatric inpatient facilities

Within contemporary inpatient mental health nursing practice, the psychodynamic model of care considered previously to be central to the nurse-patient relationship now seems a radical concept. It appears to exist only within primary care facilities and public health care practice settings. This naturalistic inquiry aimed to explicate mental health nurses' perspectives and expectations of providing psychodynamic therapeutic care in acute inpatient psychiatric facilities. Ten registered nurses working in acute inpatient mental health facilities were interviewed. Five themes emerged: a career for life, relating in a psychodynamic manner, swimming against the current, adopting a position of difference, and hopeful expectancy.

Obstacle-free range determination for rail track maintenance vehicles

Maintenance trains travel in convoy. In Australia, only the first train of the convoy pays attention to the track sig- nalization (the other convoy vehicles simply follow the preceding vehicle). Because of human errors, collisions can happen between the maintenance vehicles. Although an anti-collision system based on a laser distance meter is already in operation, the existing system has a limited range due to the curvature of the tracks. In this paper, we introduce an anti-collision system based on vision. The two main ideas are, (1) to warp the camera image into an image where the rails are parallel through a projective transform, and (2) to track the two rail curves simultaneously by evaluating small parallel segments. The performance of the system is demonstrated on an image dataset.

A framework for strategic infrastructure asset management

The concept of asset management is not a new but an evolving idea that has been attracting attention of many organisations operating and/or owning some kind of infrastructure assets. The term asset management have been used widely with fundamental differences in interpretation and usage. Regardless of the context of the usage of the term, asset management implies the process of optimising return by scrutinising performance and making key strategic decisions throughout all phases of an assets lifecycle (Sarfi and Tao, 2004). Hence, asset management is a philosophy and discipline through which organisations are enabled to more effectively deploy their resources to provide higher levels of customer service and reliability while balancing financial objectives. In Australia, asset management made its way into the public works in 1993 when the Australian Accounting Standard Board issued the Australian Accounting Standard 27 – AAS27. Standard AAS27 required government agencies to capitalise and depreciate assets rather than expense them against earnings. This development has indirectly forced organisations managing infrastructure assets to consider the useful life and cost effectiveness of asset investments. The Australian State Treasuries and the Australian National Audit Office was the first organisation to formalise the concepts and principles of asset management in Australia in which they defined asset management as “ a systematic, structured process covering the whole life of an asset”(Australian National Audit Office, 1996). This initiative led other Government bodies and industry sectors to develop, refine and apply the concept of asset management in the management of their respective infrastructure assets. Hence, it can be argued that the concept of asset management has emerged as a separate and recognised field of management during the late 1990s. In comparison to other disciplines such as construction, facilities, maintenance, project management, economics, finance, to name a few, asset management is a relatively new discipline and is clearly a contemporary topic. The primary contributors to the literature in asset management are largely government organisations and industry practitioners. These contributions take the form of guidelines and reports on the best practice of asset management. More recently, some of these best practices have been made to become a standard such as the PAS 55 (IAM, 2004, IAM, 2008b) in UK. As such, current literature in this field tends to lack well-grounded theories. To-date, while receiving relatively more interest and attention from empirical researchers, the advancement of this field, particularly in terms of the volume of academic and theoretical development is at best moderate. A plausible reason for the lack of advancement is that many researchers and practitioners are still unaware of, or unimpressed by, the contribution that asset management can make to the performance of infrastructure asset. This paper seeks to explore the practices of organisations that manage infrastructure assets to develop a framework of strategic infrastructure asset management processes. It will begin by examining the development of asset management. This is followed by the discussion on the method to be adopted for this paper. Next, is the discussion of the result form case studies. It first describes the goals of infrastructure asset management and how they can support the broader business goals. Following this, a set of core processes that can support the achievement of business goals are provided. These core processes are synthesised based on the practices of asset managers in the case study organisations.