The main objective of a production assurance program (PAP) for a production plant is to ensure that the planned production capacity is achieved. The assurance programs describe the activities necessary to fulfil the objectives, how they will be carried out, by whom, and when. These activities also provide input to decisions-making regarding design, manufacturing, construction, installation, operation, and maintenance of plants. It is a challenge to manage and improve production assurance. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss a methodology for improvement of production assurance performance through PAP, organized into four steps, namely data collection and information management, modeling and data analysis, generation of improvement alternatives and evaluation and decision-making.

The air transport business is a large, integrated, automated and complex domain with high requirements on safety, security and dependability. In order to achieve customer satisfaction and gain a global competitive advantage, provision of services is essential. In air transport business with an extensive competition, the consequences of unreliable services become more critical which may increase cost of operation and reduce productivity. Furthermore, occurrence of unreliable services might also lead to annoyance, inconvenience and a lasting customer dissatisfaction that can create serious problem with regarding the responsible company‟s marketplace position. Hence, it is crucial for air transport companies to continuously improve the quality of the services they provide to customer. In the context of air transport, maintenance process and maintenance-related services have a high impact on effectiveness, productivity and costs. Maintenance departments are required to ensure that their fleet is expected to meet, or continues to meet, airline‟s established availability performance goals (e.g. operational readiness, dispatch reliability and cost affectivity) and to ensure that demands for deliveries will met. One way to align maintenance decisions and business objectives and at the same time highlight where the potential weakness in the systems and maintenance performance can be expected, is through Fleet Availability Assurance Program (FAAP). However, an effective implementation of FAAP needs adaptation to the usage context. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to present an availability assurance program in airline industries, in which the essential functional elements of such a program are discussed. The paper also proposes an integrated information logistic infrastructure for this management system.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to review, discuss and further develop the production assurance (PA) concept; and to define and describe a typical production assurance program (PAP) and its elements. Design/methodology/approach - An explorative literature study covering PA and dependability concept was carried out on contemporary literature. During the course of the study, meetings and discussions with a number of experts in Sweden and Norway were performed. Different types of data and examples from the oil and gas industries are used to illustrate and support the discussions. Findings - This paper indicates that the concept of PA helps the decision maker to estimate whether a production plant is able to meet customer requirements, as it provides information about the production plant's delivery capacity, production rate and ability to deliver according to design or customer demands. PAP can provide a basis for effective production control. Research limitations/implications - The material analysed was mainly related to the oil and gas industry. However, the findings and discussion can be transferred to other areas of application, such as mine production plants and chemical process plants. Practical implications - A PAP is a valuable tool for production plant managers and engineers, not only for documenting a production plant's performance, but also for providing decision support for the development and optimization of the production plant to improve the plant's performance and reduce risk and uncertainties. Originality/value - In this paper the concept of dependability is extended to include capacity performance and customer requirements or market demand, which provides a measure for delivery assurance or plant production performance in relation to customer requirements. This paper also develops a generic PAP to achieve a high level of delivery assurance.

The system with a low level of reliability of being deployed in a cold climate often needs special and additional focus on maintainability characteristics in order to achieve the higher level of productivity, system availability and safety. Therefore, the maintainability issue is critical for the successful and effective operation of oil and gas installations in the Arctic environment as the working conditions are made very difficult by low temperature, ice, short period of daylight and lack of support facilities. Furthermore, the maintenance tasks or maintainability in the Arctic region is heavily influenced by the design of the task and the design of the equipment being maintained. The risk of human error in the Arctic environment is very high and about 80% of offshore accidents are caused by humans, with 64% occurring during operations. Morover, human factors/ergonomics is now recognized as a major contributor to operational safety, loss prevention and optimizing system performance in the oil and gas industries. Therefore, the study of human factor and reliability is essential to ensure the safe and reliable operation of industrial plant and systems which involve human operators. Human factors' integration aims to 'design-in' the humans into plant and system design, taking account of their capabilities and limitations. This can lead to significant savings through appropriate manning levels, maintainable plant, reduced rework and user-friendly facilities and systems.The objective of this paper is to explore potential risk factors especially in Arctic conditions with a view to how human factors/ergonomic principles can help to reduce risk factors and increase maintainability of the oil and gas industry. In this paper, the starting point is the offshore oil and gas industry, but the methodology and discussion are to a large extent general and could also be applied in the other industries.

Provision of reliable rolling stock and infrastructure equipment is an important part in achieving high levels of safety. Therefore, the railway industry uses different methods and tools to improve the performance of different subsystems in order to ensure safety and reliability, which are the important factors for passengers and cargo transportation. Hence, reliability analysis is required to identify the bottlenecks in the system and find the components or subsystems with low reliability for a desired level of performance. This paper focuses on collection and analysis of field failure data over a period in Raja Passenger Train Company of Iran. The results of data analysis show that wheel sets is the bottleneck, and it utilizes the historical data of wheel sets to determine the reliability function. Thereafter, the reliability of each type of wheel sets are identified over different time intervals and which can be used to determine the appropriate time of preventive maintenance tasks.

There is an increased use of production assurance programmes in various industries, especially in the petroleum sector. The programme describes the production assurance activities necessary to fulfil the objectives, how they will be carried out, by whom, and when. The activities provide input to decisions regarding concept, design, manufacturing, construction, installation, operation, and maintenance. However, production assurance programmes have not yet been sufficiently developed for general use. It is a challenge to implement and apply such programmes in a practical setting. There is a lack of implementation guidelines. The purpose of the current paper is to meet these challenges; the paper describes and discusses a methodology that facilitates implementation of production assurance programmes in a production plant. The starting point is the offshore oil and gas industry, but the methodology and discussion are to a large extent general and could also be applied in other industries.

The performance of mining machines depends on the reliability of the equipment used, the operating environment, the maintenance efficiency, the operation process, the technical expertise of the miners, etc. As the size and complexity of mining equipments continue to increase, the implications of equipment failure become ever more critical. Therefore, reliability analysis is required to identify the bottlenecks in the system and to find the components or subsystems with low reliability for a given designed performance. It is important to select a suitable method for data collection as well as for reliability analysis. This paper presents a case study describing reliability and availability analysis of the crushing plant number 3 at Jajarm Bauxite Mine in Iran. In this study, the crushing plant number 3 is divided into six subsystems. The parameters of some probability distributions, such as Weibull, Exponential, and Lognormal distributions have been estimated by using ReliaSoft's Weibull++6 software. The results of the analysis show that the conveyer subsystem and secondary screen subsystem are critical from a reliability point of view, and the secondary crusher subsystem and conveyer subsystem are critical from an availability point of view. The study also shows that the reliability analysis is very useful for deciding maintenance intervals.

Historically, most of the maintenance tasks in rolling stock companies are devoted to Preventive Maintenance which leads to some problems such as erroneous maintenance work, unnecessary maintenance tasks, etc. Therefore, it is essential to develop effective maintenance strategies to deal with these problems. While the safety is a significant factor in rolling stock industries, the most well known and widely applied maintenance optimization strategy is so called Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). The aim of this paper is to discuss the implementation of RCM to make maintenance of rolling stock of the Raja Passenger Train Corporation more cost effective. Therefore, the paper presents RCM implementation for the wheel sets which is the most critical subsystem from the rolling stocks reliability point of view. Finally, it recommends a modified maintenance plan which is able to improve the maintenance productivity by decreasing downtimes of passenger coaches.