Using Reliability-Centred Maintenance to Develop an Optimal Maintenance Strategy for A Micro-Grid System; A Case Study

Reliability-centred maintenance is an approach to analysing how and when equipment fails to maintain a desired level of performance or functionality. It employs the documentation of failure modes, failure effects and criticality analysis to rank potential failures, and combines this rank order with the use of a prescribed decision logic process to determine what maintenance tasks should be performed and when. Reliability-centred maintenance analysis has been used by the aviation industry to develop and update maintenance programs for their aircraft for many years. The practise has shifted to other industries. While the energy sector has prescribed the use of reliability-centred maintenance analysis to develop maintenance programs for new acquisitions like maintaining wind turbines, the use of this analysis to revise and update their current maintenance programs on existing renewable energy power plants like micro grids, is relatively new. Once the analysis yields maintenance tasks and intervals, this analysis must be successfully implemented in an optimized maintenance program to be effective. This research proposes a solution to successfully implement reliability-centred maintenance analysis results in an optimized maintenance strategy for the micro grid power generation system.