Lorenzo Fedele

Recent advances in maintenance and facility management

After illustrating the motivations for this special issue, the Editorial provides a framework of the maintenance and facility management areas, deploying the main development trends that are in action for their improvement in efficiency and effectiveness. Also the strategy and course of actions to pursue such trends are included into the framework. Finally, a structured review note of the papers included in the special issue is presented, illustrating their contribution to the framework enrichment.

Tele-maintenance intelligent system for technical plants result management

Abstract The management of technical plant for productivity and safety is generally a complex activity, particularly when many plants distributed in the territory are considered (i.e. the more and more frequent case of outsourced plants maintenance by specialized companies), granted quality and cost results are required (i.e. the case of some rather innovative contract solutions) and the technology involved is heterogeneous and innovative (i.e. electro-mechanical plants). In order to efficiently achieve the above aims an “intelligent” maintenance–management system for the distant monitoring and controlling by a remote control center has been developed. The so-called GrAMS (granted availability management system) system is conceived to give to organizations involved in technical–industrial plants management the possibility to tend to a “well-known availability” and “zero-failures” management. In particular, this study deals with the diagnostic aspects and safety level of technical plants (such as elevators, thermo-technical plants, etc.), and with the involvement of ad hoc designed software analysis tools based on neural networks and reliability indicators. Part of the research dealing with the tele-maintenance intelligent system has been financed by the Italian High Institute for Safety (ISPESL) and led to the development of a pre-industrial prototype whose realization and testing is here described.

Managing facilities under the multi-service result-oriented approach: some insights coming from the field in Italy

This paper presents a literature survey coupled with a standards survey as standpoints to develop a new facility management model based on the multi-service result-oriented approach. To prevent the most popular pitfalls in the field, the model focuses on customer satisfaction and, broadly speaking, on performance control, by embedding the customer–supplier relationship within the six-sigma framework and by suggesting the define, measure, analyse, improve and control (DMAIC) methodology. The applicability of the proposed model to the industrial environment is validated through an extensive survey on small- and medium-sized Italian enterprises: results point out that the majority of companies are well aware of the opportunities offered by the facility management discipline, but they are not still able to fully exploit these opportunities. Finally, two case studies coming from the healthcare industry further witness the applicability of the proposed model even in some particular industries, and confirmed the relevant potential improvements of the customer–supplier relationship when dealing with facilities-related services.

Neural Networks for Aeronautical Components Maintenance and Management

Aeronautic systems maintenance methodologies and management criteria for the substitution of components are continuously evolving. At first the so called hard time management procedures were utilized for establishing time based components substitutions. Even if safety conditions appeared conservative, costs grew up, both for the anticipated substitution of still good components, and for the stocking critic conditions. Operational reliability techniques were therefore introduced in order to permit components constant monitoring for evaluating the effective capacity to ensure the mission. Those techniques are statistically based. The paper attempts to demonstrate existing possibilities for the application in reliability of neural networks instead of statistical more traditional tools in order to preview the number of faults that might verify on aeronautical on board components in a certain time lapse.

An Innovative Methodology for Cost Optimization of the Maintenance of Medical Devices

The growing obsolescence of medical equipments in industrialized countries - despite of a continuously increasing expenditure for management and maintenance - causes high safety risks, high dissatisfaction and inefficiency.