Fault reporting

Fault reporting is a maintenance concept that increases operational availability and that reduces operating cost through three mechanisms.

This is a prerequisite for Condition-based maintenance.

Active redundancy can be integrated with fault reporting to reduce down time to a few minutes per year.

Formal maintenance philosophies are required by organizations whose primary responsibility is to ensure systems are ready when expected, such as space agencies and military.

Labor-intensive planned maintenance began during the rise of the industrial revolution. This depends upon periodic diagnostic evaluation based upon calendar dates, distance, or use. The intent is to accomplish diagnostic evaluations that indicate when maintenance is required to prevent inconvenience and safety issues that will occur when critical equipment failures occur during use.

The electronic revolution allowed inexpensive sensors and controls to be integrated into most equipment. This includes diagnostic indicators, fluid sensors, temperature sensors, ignition sensors, exhaust monitoring, voltage sensors, and similar monitoring equipment that indicates when maintenance is required. Sensor displays are often located in inaccessible locations that cannot be observed during normal operation. Labor-intensive periodic maintenance is often required to inspect indicators.

Some organizations have eliminated most labor-intensive periodic maintenance and diagnostic down time by implementing designs that bring all sensor status to fault indicators located in close proximity to users.

Maintenance requires three actions.

Fault discovery requires diagnostic maintenance, which requires system down time and labor costs.

Down time and cost requirements associated with diagnostics are eliminated for every item that satisfies the following criteria.

Fault reporting is an optional feature that can be forwarded to remote displays using simple configuration setting in all modern computing equipment. The system level of reporting that is appropriate for Condition Based Maintenance are critical, alert, and emergency, which indicate software termination due to failure. Specific failure reporting, like interface failure, can be integrated into applications linked with these reporting systems. There is no development cost if these are incorporated into designs.

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