A modeling approach for maintenance safety evaluation in a virtual maintenance environment

This paper presents a novel virtual maintenance application for maintenance safety evaluation (MSE) to provide recommendations on maintenance safety during the early stages of product design. The proposed methodology detects the potential defects via virtual maintenance technology, and safety evaluation could be carried out in a predictive way intuitively and systemically to decrease the possibility of accidents. After reviewing relevant publications, a MSE model with thorough consideration of the characters in the virtual maintenance environment was addressed. The model consists of evaluation contributors, evaluation criteria, and evaluation methodology. A case study on APU system maintenance was used to illustrate the performance of the evaluation model. The result showed the feasibility of virtual maintenance in improving maintenance safety designs. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.