Maintworld 4/2019

INDUSTRY EVENT
Figure 1. The view from Sentosa
beach reminds that Singapore is one
of the world’s busiest ports.
Increasing complexity,
interdependency and
connectivity through
digitalization characterize the
current society and the engineering
systems involved.
The World Congress 2019 in
Singapore offered a forum
for cross-fertilization across
the disciplines by bringing
the professionals in asset
management, reliability and
resilience together.
THE ONGOING disruptive trends such as
digitalisation, automation, novel business
models and the emergence of cyberphysical
systems (CPS) have resulted
in increased connectivity within and
between infrastructure and industrial
systems. This development leads to the
increasing complexity of the systems of
systems and creates challenges in the
design, operation, maintenance and
renewal of the assets. World Congress
on Asset Management (WCEAM) is
an annual conference that displays the
recent development in the technologies,
methodologies, processes and tools in
the engineering asset management. In
this year, the WCEAM was organized as
a track in the Resilience, Reliability and
Asset Management (WCRRAM) conference
in Singapore. The event brought
together scientists, policymakers, and
practitioners from different continents
to share the latest knowledge, approaches
and experiences to make interdependent
infrastructure and industrial
systems more robust and resilient.
The congress and the networking opportunities
provided a platform to crossfertilize
ideas and develop new insights
for the management of future engineering
assets. The topics of the engineering
asset management track addressed
major sectors of the capital-intensive
industries, mining, public infrastructure,
and service industry asset management.
The reliability track highlighted the key
issues of asset management including
system reliability and safety, and prognostic
health monitoring of complex systems.
The resilience track sessions emphasized
the importance of the societal
aspects of infrastructure and industrial
systems including metrics, modelling
and design for resilience (robustness,
recoverability).
Eras of reliability optimization
World-class keynote speakers’ presentations
provided interesting thoughts and
laid the groundwork for reflections during
the technical sessions. The keynote
provided by Professor David W. Coit
from the Rutgers University, USA, addressed
the development of the reliability
engineering as a path through three
identified eras. These were the eras of
mathematical programming, pragmatism
and active reliability improvement.
He highlighted the progress from individual
analyses towards continuous improvement,
the progress from dynamic
programming to integrated design and
optimization techniques for complex
systems. The discussion related to the
era of active reliability improvement
well covered the aspects also highlighted
by the current conference, namely integration
with new data, continuous optimization
and consideration of resiliency.
Advanced safety analysis
methods needed for
autonomous machinery
Research results and practical experiences
of system safety engineering
methods for autonomous vehicles were
shared in three presentations. Applications
of systems engineering principles,
V-model framework as well as software
safety issues in complex systems were
discussed. Safety requirements and
technologies for autonomous vehicles
are still strongly evolving. Research on
innovative safety engineering and risk
mitigation methodologies are needed to
be able to manage risk arising from the
higher levels of vehicle autonomy and
to enhance the safety of autonomous
systems.
System modelling and multi-criteria
analysis methods for safety analysis of
complex control systems were discussed
in several presentations. Use cases and
experiences from aviation, military and
energy sectors were introduced. Ms
Yuan Yuan from Beihang University presented
a safety analysis method for vehicle
systems having complex coupling
relationships in the perspective of time,
space, function, structure and other aspects
because of the influence of the condition
of the operator, equipment under
control and the operating environment.
The method is based on functional resonance
method (FRAM), Bayesian model
under multi-factor coupling to analyze
the coupling effect of human, machine
and environment and their influences on
the behaviour of complex systems.
Asset management is getting
smarter, but how?
Mr. Brandon Lee from Intech Process
Automation shared thoughts about the
adoption of Industry 4.0 and particularly
concepts for the effective use of data in
different use cases in his keynote. Features
of Smart asset management were
discussed; more specifically Mr. Lee addressed
the opportunity to orchestrate
efficient operation with optimal resource
utilization through smart assets
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