Abstract
High-value manufacturing companies are increasingly offering through-life support for their products and guaranteeing their performance. Recently published report from the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Through-life Engineering Services has identified Through-life Engineering Services (TES) will be a critical discriminator in global markets for engineering support and services worth nearly £1 trillion by 2025. Today in the aerospace and defence sectors, over half the revenue is coming from these through-life engineering services and it is growing. Other sectors, such as the railways, wind energy and automotive have also recognised this potential and are striving to grow their TES businesses. With the increasing popularity of performance- or availability-based contracts for high-value equipment, manufacturers are looking to increase the life of components, reduce maintenance costs and thus maximise revenue. TES are those technical services that are necessary to guarantee the required and predictable performance of complex engineering systems throughout their expected operational life with the optimum whole life cost. TES research is focusing on developing technology and engineering solutions to address the new support requirements for these performance-based contracts where maintenance is the major engineering service.
This special issue is based on the state-of-the-art research papers presented at the 2nd International Through-life Engineering Services Conference(TESConf 2013) addressing many aspects of the technological and operational challenges involved in this service provision. The TESConf series of conferences are organised by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Through-life Engineering Services, based at Cranfield and Durham Universities. TESConf continues to be organised every year by the Centre as an international forum to share best practice, develop the research community and stimulate future technological development to support through-life engineering services design and delivery. Out of the 79 papers presented at TESConf2013, 12 papers were invited to submit significantly enhanced research for this special issue. Following further detailed peer review, 5 papers have been finally accepted for this special issue. These papers reflect the latest research and industrial best practices in the simulation of maintenance strategies, techniques for dealing with part obsolescence and electrical and electronic waste, and self-configuring and self-repairing technologies for enhancing the resilience of electronic and mechanical components and subsystems.
The first paper titled ‘Simulation of predictive maintenance strategies for cost-effectiveness analysis’ presents a methodology that uses Monte Carlo simulation to provide a continuous assessment of predictive maintenance technologies with respect to specific business scenarios. The second paper titled ‘Forecasting technology and part obsolescence’ reviews methods that are used to forecast obsolescence, focusing on long-term forecasting used to predict the obsolescence dates for technologies and electronic parts. The third paper titled ‘A systematic selective disassembly approach for waste electrical and electronic equipment with case study on liquid crystal display televisions’ presents a systematic selective disassembly approach for handling waste electrical and electronic equipment with a maximum disassembly profit in accordance with the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment and Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directives. The fourth paper titled ‘Creating self-configuring logic with built-in resilience to multiple-upset events’ proposes a novel self-restoration design strategy that is able to self-reconstruct the correct functional logic configuration in the event of transient faults without external intervention. The fifth and final paper titled ‘Self-repairing design process applied to a 4-bar linkage mechanism’ demonstrates that by shifting the focus from a detailed assessment of the underlying cause of failure to how that failure will manifest, a generic 4-bar linkage mechanism is able to return to a near perfect state of operation even after a permanent deformation occurs in the mechanism.