Reference no: EM133932478
Asset and Facility Management
You are required to form groups of four to work together as a team to conduct an asset management project. You will need to demonstrate good teamwork, leadership, communication, project management skills, as well as domain knowledge, to achieve a quality outcome.
Objective
Asset and facility management involves complex decision-making across the asset lifecycle, especially under conditions of uncertainty and competing constraints (e.g. cost, availability, sustainability, safety). The objective of the project is to research and report on the application of data-driven techniques, and reliability and maintainability engineering principles in optimising engineering asset management practices.
The Task and Teamwork
One of the core competencies of higher degree graduates is applying research thinking (e.g., critical thinking, extractive thinking, creative thinking) and analytical skills. This project has been designed to foster that development.
Team members should work both individually and collaboratively under the leadership of a project leader. At the same time, each team member must play a leadership role in different phases of the project. Each member's performance will be reflected through peer assessment and presentation.
The following tasks are a general guide:
Review existing literature and practices on data-driven, model-based, and AI-supported maintenance and monitoring techniques. Highlight how they can create opportunities to improve asset performance (availability, maintenance, safety and risk).
Identify a real-world challenge in asset or facility management. Define a relevant industry and asset (or asset system), and outline the operational or economic impacts associated with the challenge. You may use GenAI tools to assist with early scoping and idea generation (must be declared).
Select a linear or infrastructural asset for your case study. In relation to the asset of interest, identify the critical failure modes and their measurable condition indicators which can be effectively monitored for data acquisition. Get top-notch online assignment help.
Conduct a technical analysis using appropriate reliability and maintenance techniques. This should include:
Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), which can be supported by GenAI tools if used with justification and validation. Note that evidence of this use must be provided in the final report.
Component-level modelling (e.g., Weibull or exponential failure data fitting)
System-level modelling (e.g., Reliability Block Diagram, Fault Tree Analysis, or Event Tree
Analysis)
Maintainability and availability analysis
For technical assessment, you need to access failure/maintenance/cost data, which can be sourced from:
Use publicly available data from technical reports or literature data
Simulate data with engineering assumptions
Use GenAI tools for data generation, early analysis, or visualisation (must be declared and validated)
Based on the technical assessments, evaluate the performance of the asset based on industry benchmarks or key performance indicators (KPIs). This should help you identify strategies within asset management that can improve performance. These might include:
Condition-based or predictive maintenance
Sensor or AI-enabled monitoring
Redesign of asset/component
Demonstrate how these improvements can be achieved using a set of qualitative and quantitative analyses of key indicators (availability, cost, safety and sustainability).
Perform a cost analysis (based on necessary assumptions) to assess economic feasibility of investing in such improvements for the asset in your case study.
Present the findings from your study and generate an argument for future improvement plan through a professional report.
Some recommended linear or infrastructural assets:
Renewable Energy (solar, wind, hydro-electric)
Food and Process (sugarcane juice processing equipment, chemical processing equipment)
Rail, road, or bridges
Building or any critical infrastructure
Group Research Report Structure
A general approach and structure on writing reports can be found on this link.
This reference forms the basis of the report structure. It is recommended the main body of the report to be within 6000-7000 words.
The report structure should include the following (but not limited to):
Title page (see title page requirement at Annex A)
Executive Summary (~500 words)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Literature review
Application of data-driven methods and its required technology in engineering asset management
Case study of a linear or infrastructural asset
Asset Description
Asset management challenge explanation
Failure mode analysis and identification of condition indicators
Reliability, Availability and Maintainability Assessment
Improvement Strategy and Demonstration of Benefits
Economic analysis study
Conclusion
Reference List (cite using APA Style)
Appendixes (not included in word count)