7. Improving operational availability

The question may arise as to how to improve the operational availability of a piece of equipment, considered on its own (excluding the use of back-up equipment, as discussed in §. ).

In this case, the aim is often to improve reliability (i.e. reduce the frequency of failures).

However, it is possible to intervene on all three components of availability (reliability, maintainability and maintenance logistics), without there being a single answer.

By way of illustration, in the table 5 below, we are interested in (stationary) availability, evaluated as the ratio between effective production time and opening time, assumed to be equal...