Marine Policy 26 (2002) 325–335 A study of reliability-centred maintenance in maritime operations A.J. Mokashi a , J. Wang a, *, A.K. Vermar b a School of Engineering, Liverpool John Moores University, Byrom Street, Liverpool L3 3AF, UK b Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India Received 10 January 2002; accepted 7 February 2002 Abstract This paper has identified specific problems likely to be encountered in endeavour of implementing reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) on ships. These stem out of the cultural differences between the aviation and maritime industries. In the maritime industry, RCM is often considered resource demanding. It is however possible to make the project manageable by starting with a critical system. Considerable savings in time and effort can also be achieved by using a reverse logic where the failure modes are identified by analysing the maintenance tasks. A subjective qualitative approach has been proposed to overcome the limitations of the definitive logic used by the decision trees and the demand for failure data imposed by quantitative methods. A fuel oil purification system has been used as a test case to demonstrate its use. There is appreciation amongst both classification societies and equipment suppliers of the principles of RCM in the maritime industry. This makes the application of the RCM concept feasible. Finally it is the seafarer, who will have to be on the forefront of this endeavour and total productive maintenance can be used to create the right work environment to achieve this. It is concluded that rather than looking at RCM as a methodology and trying to use it as such, it makes more sense to consider it as a philosophy and use its guiding principles to help the seafarer plan his maintenance strategy. r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Maintenance strategy; Marine operations; Reliability-centred maintenance 1. Introduction Maintenance costs form a significant part of the overall operating costs in ship operations. Maintenance also affects reliability and can thus have environmental and safety consequences. The International Manage- ment Code for the Safe Operation of Ships and for Pollution Prevention (International Safety Management (ISM) Code) addresses the management aspects. These are considered to be closely associated with human error, which is responsible for up to 80% of the marine accident cases. The importance of maintenance is demonstrated by the fact that it is the only shipboard activity to have one whole element assigned to it (i.e. ISM Code element 10) [1]. ISM Code element 10 focusing on maintenance of ship and equipment inter alia states that ‘‘The Company should establish procedures in its SMS (Safety Manage- ment System) to identify equipment and technical systems the sudden operational failure of which may result in hazardous situations. The SMS should provide for specific measures aimed at promoting the reliability of such equipment or systems’’. This is consistent with what reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) delivers. RCM focuses the maintenance resources only on those items that affect the system reliability, thereby making the maintenance programme cost effective on the long run. However, most of the attempts to implement RCM on ships have been done by shore-based consultants or academics. To really benefit from the process the ship staff should be able to use it in their onboard maintenance analysis. This is because RCM results are based on the operating context, which keeps changing with the type of cargo, voyage, crew, etc. RCM was initially developed by the aviation industry where it has delivered excellent results. This has encouraged various other industries to use it to improve their maintenance practices [2]. However, applying RCM to ships could have some hurdles. These include: (1) Lack and portability of failure data: There is no easy access to failure data as there is no composite *Corresponding author. Tel.: +44-151-231-2445; fax: +44-151-231- 2453. E-mail address: j.wang@livjm.ac.uk (J. Wang). 0308-597X/02/$ - see front matter r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0308-597X(02)00014-3