Increasing ship operational reliability through the implementation of a holistic maintenance management strategy

Ship maintenance was initially considered as more of a financial burden than as a way to preserve safety, environment and quality transportation. The benefits from applying a sound and systematic maintenance policy are emerging both in the minimisation of unnecessary downtime as well as in the increase of operational capability. In this paper, a novel predictive maintenance strategy is demonstrated, combining the existing ship operational and maintenance tasks with the advances stemming from new applied techniques. The initial step for the application of the above-mentioned strategy is also shown regarding the machinery space of a cruise ship. Well-known tools are applied such as Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). Outcomes of this study are the identification of the critical components of the system, the estimation of the reliability of the overall system and sub-systems, the prioritisation of the maintenance tasks and finally the availability of the specific end events/items.