Guest editorial

Citation

Adjallah, K.H. (2007), "Guest editorial", Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Vol. 13 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jqme.2007.15413baa.001

Guest editorial

About the Guest EditorKondo H. Adjallah received an MS degree in electrical engineering and automation control engineering from the University of Nancy 1, France, in 1989. Then, in 1993 he earned a PhD degree in electrical engineering, while he was working on the problems of diagnosis of dynamic systems at the National Polytechnic Institute of Lorraine, France. He served as Assistant Professor in 1994 at the University of Nancy 1, France. He has been Associate Professor since 1995 at the University of Technology of Troyes (UTT) in France where he was appointed as HDR (Research Director) in 2003. He directed the undergraduate program of industrial systems maintenance engineering at the UTT from 1995 to 2006. He leads research activities with the Institute Charles Delaunay affiliated to the French CNRS, within the Research Group of Optimization of Industrial Systems. His research interests include methods of real-time management of components health monitoring and predictive maintenance in networked distributed systems. He was a visiting Professor from 2005 to 2006 at the University of Cincinnati, Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Nuclear Engineering, NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on Intelligent Maintenance Systems. He is also member of the societies IEEE and INFORMS.

The continuous integration of various new materials and technologies in the machineries contributes to a constant increase in their complexity and, thereby, the complexity and cost of their maintenance. It is therefore essential to develop new approaches to support their maintenance, given that the detrimental impacts of any failure on the operating and maintenance costs are critical. Preventing the loss of effectiveness and failure of machineries has become a major issue for the end users vis-à-vis the quality of products, services, and the safety. Since the machinery’s design phase, increasing efforts are now devoted at means for anticipating irreversible degradation leading to unforeseeable situations, at the technical, economic, human and environmental levels.

One knows that certain excessive maintenance expenditures would be avoided by using simple aide devices defined during the design, for detecting incipient degradations. But in the cases of certain complex systems, technologies of direct symptoms measurement of loss of performance, or sufficiently accurate prediction models can be necessary to unveil the degradation processes, using advanced digital methods.

To prevent damaging failures to machineries, today’s low cost computing devices enable to develop new powerful tools capable of extracting the relevant decisive information from the operating data, using advanced sensor technologies, digital signal processing, and realistic modeling of processes. Such models range from simple signal to models of complex and distributed processes with embedded intelligence.

This special issue gathers the extended and updated versions of eight papers selected from among 58 papers from the IMS 2004 international conference, which was held in Arles, Troyes, France, July 15-16, 2004. They introduce some original approaches and new results that thrust to a real-world predictive maintenance application. This special issue also aims at promoting the development of intelligent and efficient maintenance systems, to reach failure risks closer to zero. The selected papers offer methods enabling a satisfactory operational availability of machineries, through the monitoring, the diagnosis, the forecasting and the decision support to predictive maintenance actions.

Lastly, the contributions confirm that, to attain the excellence of predictive maintenance in practice, it is essential to overcome the technical and technological obstacles experienced, through closer cooperation between researchers and expert engineers.

Acknowledgements

The Guest Editor is very grateful to all the reviewers and thank, the authors for their contributions to this special issue. For their kind support to the organization of the conference and the special issue, a warm acknowledgement is made to Professor Jay Lee, Head of the NSF I/UCRC IMS, University of Cincinnati and to Professor Benoît Iung of University of Nancy 1, CRAN, France. Thanks also to Professor Daniel Noyes, LPG, Ecole National d’Ingénieur de Tarbes, France, and to Professor Noureddine Zerhouni, LAB, Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique et des Microtechniques de Besançon, France. Lastly, a great acknowledgement is made to Professor Salih O. Duffuaa for all his efforts for publishing the selected manuscripts.

Kondo H. AdjallahGuest Editor