Subject Overview

Maintenance and Reliability Engineering integrates engineering, statistics, operations, economics and asset management to ensure that mechanical systems perform safely, dependably and cost-effectively throughout their life cycles. The subject covers failure behaviour, reliability modelling, maintenance strategies, diagnostics, planning, risk, digital technologies and governance.

Learning Goal

Students will be able to analyse equipment failures, quantify reliability and availability, select and optimise maintenance policies, plan maintenance resources, apply risk- and condition-based methods, use reliability data and digital tools, and make ethical, safety-conscious life-cycle asset decisions in contemporary industrial environments.

Syllabus

1. Foundations of Maintenance and Reliability Engineering

Learning Objective: Define reliability, maintainability, availability, dependability, failure, defect, downtime and asset life cycle; explain maintenance objectives, organisational roles, failure consequences and the relationship between design, operation and maintenance.

Category: foundation

2. Failure Mechanisms and Failure Behaviour

Learning Objective: Analyse mechanical, thermal, electrical and human-induced failure mechanisms, including fatigue, wear, corrosion, fracture, creep and lubrication failure; interpret bathtub curves, degradation patterns and failure modes.

Category: foundation

3. Reliability Probability and Statistical Foundations

Learning Objective: Apply probability distributions, survival and hazard functions, MTBF, MTTF and failure-rate models; estimate reliability using complete, censored and field data while recognising uncertainty and data-quality limitations.

Category: core

4. Component and System Reliability Modelling

Learning Objective: Model series, parallel, standby and complex systems using reliability block diagrams, fault trees, event trees and Markov models; evaluate redundancy, common-cause failures and reliability allocation.

Category: core

5. Maintainability, Availability and Supportability

Learning Objective: Quantify maintainability, repair time, inherent and operational availability, downtime and maintenance support performance; improve accessibility, modularity, diagnostics, standardisation and design for maintainability.

Category: core

6. Maintenance Strategies and Policy Selection

Learning Objective: Compare corrective, preventive, predictive, condition-based, opportunistic and shutdown maintenance; select policies using failure behaviour, criticality, cost, risk and operational context.

Category: core

7. Maintenance Planning, Scheduling and Work Control

Learning Objective: Develop job plans, work orders, labour and tool requirements, maintenance schedules, shutdown plans and backlog controls; apply priority rules, capacity planning and schedule-compliance practices.

Category: application

8. Condition Monitoring and Fault Diagnosis

Learning Objective: Apply vibration analysis, oil and wear-debris analysis, thermography, ultrasonics, acoustic emission, motor-current analysis and nondestructive testing; establish baselines, alarm limits and diagnostic workflows.

Category: application

9. FMEA, Criticality Analysis and Reliability-Centred Maintenance

Learning Objective: Perform FMEA/FMECA, consequence analysis and criticality ranking; apply the Reliability-Centred Maintenance process to identify technically feasible and economically justified maintenance tasks.

Category: core

10. Risk-Based Inspection, Safety and Integrity Management

Learning Objective: Assess probability and consequence of failure, construct risk matrices and inspection plans, and apply risk-based inspection, functional safety, mechanical integrity and regulatory compliance principles to hazardous assets.

Category: application

11. Reliability Testing and Design Improvement

Learning Objective: Plan life tests, accelerated tests and reliability demonstrations; use stress–strength analysis, derating, design margins, root-cause analysis, FRACAS and reliability growth methods to improve product and equipment design.

Category: advanced

12. Spare Parts, Maintenance Logistics and Resource Optimisation

Learning Objective: Classify critical spares, forecast intermittent demand, determine reorder points and service levels, and balance inventory cost against downtime risk, repair capacity, obsolescence and supply-chain resilience.

Category: application

13. Maintenance Economics, Analytics and Performance Management

Learning Objective: Use life-cycle costing, replacement analysis, cost–benefit analysis and optimisation to support repair-or-replace and maintenance-interval decisions; manage KPIs such as OEE, availability, MTBF, MTTR and maintenance cost.

Category: strategic

14. TPM, Lean Maintenance and Human Factors

Learning Objective: Apply Total Productive Maintenance, autonomous maintenance, 5S, Kaizen and waste elimination; address competency, ergonomics, communication, error prevention, contractor management and organisational reliability culture.

Category: strategic

15. Digital Maintenance, AI and Asset Governance

Learning Objective: Use CMMS/EAM, industrial IoT, digital twins, cloud/edge platforms and AI-based prognostics for decision support; address cybersecurity, explainability, data governance and ethics, and align asset management with ISO 55000, sustainability and emerging autonomous-maintenance practices.

Category: contemporary