Improving ship maintenance: examining the case of pipe laying vessels

Maintenance management in shipping industry is continuously being improved in order to ensure that structures and machinery are operated and maintained in accordance with the established rules and regulations. That is enforced by the current condition in maritime industry to apply similar methods of maintenance that have effectively been applied in other industrial fields. More specifically, new maintenance strategies that combine new tools, such as reliability analysis and condition monitoring, with the traditional well-established maintenance methods, have been introduced. The study herein presents a review of the modern maintenance methods in shipping, as well as a review of the reliability assessment tools, such as Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) and Markov Analysis. Further on, Fault Trees with time-dependant dynamic gates are used to model the pipelay system of two vessels in order to examine their reliability performance through FTA. Main outcomes are the identification of the reliability behaviour of the systems and their subsystems, as well as of their most critical failures. Based on those results, substantial conclusions about the improvement of the maintenance of subject systems are derived.