A Study on Condition-Based Maintenance with Applications to Industrial Vehicles

Abstract: The company CrossControl develops display computers for control systems in industrial vehicles which operate in rough environments. Currently, the system can detect and diagnose different faults but CrossControl would also like to predict upcoming failures by using Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM). CBM is a cost effective maintenance strategy where the health condition of the system is monitored and maintenance is only performed after a degradation in performance has been observed. This thesis work aims to investigate the possibilities of implementing CBM on CrossControl's system by studying the theory behind CBM and associated methods and by analysing real data from the system of one of CrossControl's customers. The results presented in this thesis consist of two literature studies and one case study. The first literature study introduces different types of maintenance and gives a detailed explanation of CBM. The second literature study contains a collection of methods used to estimate the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of the system, which is an important step in CBM. The case study considers the twistlocks of Bromma Conquip's spreader system and serves as an example of how CBM can be used in practise and exemplifies some difficulties that can be encountered when implementing CBM. Finally, a discussion of the obtained results and some suggestions for future work and ideas for how CBM can be implemented on CrossControl's system are given.