International Journal of Energy, Environment, and Economics ISSN: 1054-853X Volume 20, Number 2 2012 Nova Science Publishers,

, Inc.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT OF MAINTENANCE ACTIVITIES FOR POTABLE WATER DISTRIBUTION BUSINESS

Mohammad D. Al-Tahat* and Hasan Al-Shoubaki
Industrial Engineering Department, University of Jordan, Amman 11942, Jordan

ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to develop and to present a maintenance knowledge management system that can be used to enhance management efficiency of maintenance and operations activities at water distribution companies, a big Jordanian water distribution company labeled as Muna is used as a case study. A maintenance knowledge management system that depends basically on the failure tree analysis is designed. All failures, symptoms, and causes as well as all maintenance procedures and follow up actions are diagnosed and mapped. Basic Design Principles of Expert Systems (DPES) is pursued. Consequently new knowledge management system composed of five main component is developed, these components are; Knowledge database, reporting and history, relationships, rule-based expert system, and links and interfaces. It has been found that the developed maintenance knowledge management system has a high potential for maintaining Muna's assets by increasing mean time to fail and decreasing mean time to repair. The system has been used effectively to manage and support the operations and maintenance departments in Muna Company. The developed system has a positive impact to Muna specially when comparing it with the existing used one. It is built based on day-by-day manual data collecting, knowledge base is constructed by a knowledgeable maintenance engineer corporate with the maintenance experts; it is recommended for future similar work to collect the maintenance knowledge using questionnaires or an automated system like Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. This work adds to Muna and to similar business systems more valuable knowledge utilization system instead of the old restricted one. That helps the maintenance crew to follow up the assets in all company locations rapidly and efficiently.

Keywords: Knowledge management, Knowledge and information, use/utilization, Maintenance planning, Management of potable water.

Knowledge

Corresponding author: Tel.: +962 6 5355000, Ext. 22933. Fax: +962 6 535 5588; altahat@ju.edu.jo.

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INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW

Improving water delivery is a pressing societal goal, and Knowledge Management (KM) has a positive role in effecting change when providing this service. Information science research has led to understanding theories and practices of knowledge use within the informing professions, also KM has the potential to influence and enhance other professional disciplines. KM is a beneficial framework to help water distribution companies manage their practices and ultimately administer quality service to their customers. The main focus of this paper is to develop and to present a maintenance knowledge management system that can be used to enhance the efficiency of maintenance and operations activities at water distribution companies, a case study to achieve this purpose will be employed. Developing of such maintenance knowledge system is required for effective maintenance and operations practice of water providing systems that will require a substantial investment. The return on this investment is depending on the appropriateness of the developed system, the effectiveness of its implementation and the personnel commitment to it. To achieve the objectives of this paper Design Principles of Expert Systems (DPES) is followed. Many research works have been conducted to apply DPES to manage knowledge of different companies such as Su et al (2001), Su et al (2006), Emmanouilidis et al (2006), Patel et al (1996), Kerr (2007), Choi et al (2006), Thomas et al (2004), Reilly (2001) and many others. Su et al (2001) pointed that the nature and quality of users' interaction with expert systems has been an increasing concern. The design of the user interface is influenced by many factors, amongst these the mental model of the user's thinking processes, aspects of usability and the explanation capabilities of the knowledge-based expert system. Another study by Su et al (2006) pointed that the Taiwan motorcycle industry got its start in 1952 when gas engines were installed on bicycles to create the islands first motorbikes. The diagnostic errors often result in wasting customers time and money or producing new failure mechanisms. These phenomena indicated that the main problem is lack of knowledge sharing and consistent direction that is referable. Flexible software solution has been developed by Emmanouilidis et al (2006) to facilitate a wide range of monitoring scenarios, where monitoring, novelty identification and machinery diagnostics, can easily be customized. The objective of Emmanouilidis work was to develop a system capable of performing novelty detection and failure diagnosis, even in cases when very little a priori knowledge exists about the monitoring task. Another study by Kerr (2007) pointed that the city of Lima Ohio introduced a special software as same as Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) to nearly 100 personnel in its utilities department to facilitate its customer service, water treatment, water delivery, sewer collection, and wastewater treatment operations. The software replaces multiple systems and databases to provide a single, easy to-use system for computerized maintenance of its water and wastewater operations.

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DEVELOPING THE REQUIRED KNOWLEDGE MAINTENANCE SYSTEM

The proposed Knowledge Management System is structured as shown in figure 1, it is composed of the following main parts: 1. Knowledge database. Knowledge is collected from many fields and departments of the company. It includes - As shown in the upper left part of figure 1- various types of information regarding, technical details, sites coordinates, equipments, maintenance staff, and many other maintenance-related details. Database is used to create status and/or history reports about any asset. And it is used to formulate different maintenance algorithms that may use for labor efficiency calculations and designing maintenance schedules. 2. Reporting, history and calculations. This part is concerning of importing and exporting data, generating historical maintenance reports through retrieving of information resources available in the database, updating and modifying database. 3. Rule-based Expert System (ES). It is the core of the developed maintenance management system, composed as shown in figure 2, of knowledge base (the rules and the facts), inference engine, and user interface. It determines the symptoms, causes, and the solutions for every probable failure, and clarifies all the needed explanations regarding maintenance procedures, maintenance equipments and tools, manpower capacity, and the standard time of maintenance action. Knowledge base incorporates all maintenance knowledge of Muna Company. Maintenance procedures are decoded from maintenance experts into rules and facts by knowledge engineer. Rule -based technique is used in the inference engine which acquired the rules and facts from the knowledge base to generate decision regarding root cause of maintenance problems and their solutions, as well as to propose predictive maintenance procedures. The nature and quality of users' interaction with expert systems has a big concern. Understanding of the user's cognitive structure and the users' task is of a big concern when designing user interface. A good interface should enhance user/expert system interaction and task performance. 4. Maintenance and operations relationships. Different maintenance activities and functions should be performed according to maintenance objectives. These activities are classified into managerial maintenance activities and technical ones. Managerial activities include, planning, scheduling, supervising, controlling etc. Planning is the setup of objectives and the determination of ways to achieve them. It is defining which job to do and how to do it, Scheduling is defined as deciding when to do the job. Finally, controlling is the assurance that activity plans are executed properly. These activities are executed by maintenance manager and by heads of departments. On the other hand, technical activities include preventive maintenance activities; diagnostics and repair of failures, calibration, construction, in addition to quality control are executed by maintenance technicians and supervisors.

Figure 1. Main structure of the developed maintenance knowledge management system.

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Operations department performs two types of reports, first, following up the failure daily reports that sent to the maintenance department to take an action to solve problems (failure), second, statistical data regarding daily and/or monthly reports are analyzed by maintenance management to create prediction maintenance programs. 5. The flask that holds all connections, interfaces, and links between the main parts of the proposed knowledge management system. Visual Basic VB programming language is used to build such flask. Visual Basic (VB) is the third-generation eventdriven programming language and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from Microsoft for its Component Object Model (COM) programming model. VB is considered a relatively easy to learn and use programming language, because of its graphical development features and BASIC heritage, that enables rapid application development (RAD) of Graphical User Interface (GUI) applications, access to databases using data access objects, remote data objects, and creation of ActiveX controls and objects. The developed Visual Basic program enables to, run maintenance algorithms on the computing agent like the computers, assists in making more effective use of Microsoft Excel sheet, provides a suitable user interface in our worksheet, and expresses and manipulate complex logic formulas when needed. Figure 3 presents the main window of the system flask coded by Visual Basic VB, the figure also shows the included icons and their explanation. Three main types of maintenance schedules are generated out of this part of the system, these are; preventive maintenance schedule, corrective maintenance schedule, and predictive maintenance schedule.

Figure 2. The building blocks of the expert system.

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Figure 3. Icons and their explanations in the main window of system flask coded by VB.

KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND PROBLEM SOLVING

Liebowitz (1997) defines knowledge acquisition as The process of extracting, structuring, and organizing knowledge from several knowledge sources, so that the problemsolving expertise can be captured and transformed into a computer-readable form. The knowledge base of the proposed knowledge management system involves knowledge acquisition and representation. Knowledge to be represented is extracted from the sources where it exists. These include documented rules, procedures, written text, and contents of existing databases or undocumented knowledge in the minds of human experts (Kerr, 1991). Figure 4 presents some knowledge sources used when building knowledge-based, this model is presented by Turban (1988). Knowledge representation is a multidisciplinary subject that applies theories and techniques from other fields (Sowa, 2000), like, logic that provides the formal structure and rules of inference. Knowledge representation formalizes and organizes the knowledge. One widely used representation is the production rule, or simply rule. A rule consists of an IF part and a THEN part (also called a condition and an action, see Figure 5). "IF" part lists a set of conditions in some logical combination. The piece of knowledge represented by the production rule is relevant to the line of reasoning being developed if the IF part of the rule is satisfied; consequently, the "THEN" part can be concluded, or its problem-solving action taken. Expert System whose knowledge is represented in rule form is called rule-based expert system (Rich et al., 1991). Each rule specifies what to do, or what conclusion to draw, under a set of well-defined circumstances. Some sets of typical rules are; rules to represent facts, rules to identify symptoms, rules to suggest repair procedure, and rules to prioritize maintenance. Maintenance Knowledge representation depends on troubleshooting of failures through diagnostics of symptoms and their root causes. A failure accompanies a number of symptoms that assigned to a number of causes, called causes of symptoms or causes of the failure. Thus a failure can be represented simply as: Failure= {Symptoms, Causes of Symptoms}.

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Figure 4. Knowledge sources and representation.

Figure 5. The rule-based technique: Decision making.

Figure 6. Symptoms, causes and solutions of gas detector failure.

Figure 7. Failures mapping as well as their root causes and symptoms.

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Using this pattern of representation gas detector failure which is explained in details by figure 6 can be described as:

Gas leakage Real fire Not normal resistance Old and failed sensor Gas detector failure = Defected Cable Gas Leakage Error Power Source Not Normal Voltage
This problem solving process is including; 1) Problem diagnostics which means the definition of both the failure symptoms and causes, 2) Problem analysis, implies the suggestion of possible solutions, and 3) Decision making, where the appropriate solution, action or decision concerning the problem failure is chosen. Consequently, solved failure with all details is stored in the database to be used later. This problem-solving method is built into the inference engine based on forward and sometimes backward chaining as a control method to manipulate and to use knowledge to form a line of reasoning. In Muna Company sixteen different failure types were observed, these types as well as their root causes and symptoms are mapped as presented in Figure 7. Table 1. Comparison between the developed maintenance knowledge system and the existing used one
Dimension Programming language Searching type Format of Equipment History reports User Maintenance Schedules Calculations The developed system Visual Basic By ID, location, and equipment type Detailed table Multi users Corrective, Preventive, and Predictive Equipment efficiency, labor efficiency, availability, and failure rate A special form for each equipment type Through rule-based technique and the knowledge base expert system with the explanations for each question and solution The existing used system Oracle By ID Descriptive text Single user Corrective and preventive Equipment efficiency

Data Equipment Format Diagnostics and Solving of Failures

There is no any form for the equipments Through human experts guessing from the last experiences

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CONCLUSION
A real maintenance knowledge management system for potable water distribution Company labeled as Muna is developed. The system enables following up works, actions and failures of systems in maintenance departments of the company effectively. Failure tree analysis technique is used successfully to evaluate failures for the Company's assets. Basic design principles of expert systems are followed. The developed system composed of; knowledge database, reporting and history, relationships, rule-based expert system, and links and interfaces. One main advantage of the developed system is that it increasing the availability of the equipments and decreasing the mean time to repair. Table 1 illustrates the major differences between the developed system and the existing used one. Connection between the developed maintenance management system and inventory management is recommended as an extension to this work.

REFERENCES
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