Failure Cause
- Last UpdatedMay 13, 2025
- 4 minute read
A failure cause in Asset Strategy Optimization determines the way, and condition under which a component may fail. A component may have more than one failure cause. The failure cause dictates the way in which the parent level part is affected by the failure. The failure mode in the failure cause dictates the impact of the failure on the business objective.
For a failure cause, it is possible to create one or more types of maintenance. The following types are available:
Tab Failure Cause - General
The Failure Cause has properties that can be edited by the user in the Property Grid. Optionally, by double-clicking on the respective component, users can open the Properties screen, as shown below:
Properties of the Failure Cause - tab General
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FIELD |
DESCRIPTION |
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Description |
Description of the failure cause. |
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Condition |
Description of the failure cause condition. |
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Selection from use-related or time-related options. |
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Selection from predefined failure modes. |
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MTTF time relating to the combination of failure cause and condition. |
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Types of statistical distribution:
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Standard deviation of distribution. |
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Percentage of function loss on occurrence of failure cause for the Model as a whole. The value indicates how much of the Model function will be lost as a percentage of the total function of the Model in case of failure indicated in the Failure cause. This field only has impact on calculations if the field 'Effect on Maintenance' of the underlying maintenance action has one of the values 'No Effect' or 'Out of Service'. If 'Down' is chosen, the function loss will always be considered to be 100%. The initial value of the field will be 0%, or no function loss. To indicate function loss, this number should be set somewhere between 1% and 100% (full loss of function). The impact is mainly when simulating, i.e. in down time reports. Example: when the function loss is set to 75%, this value will be applied to the downtime. A downtime of 4 hours would be decreased to 3 hours with a function loss set to 75%. Also, the total production loss of the complete Model will be calculated as the function loss percentage * downtime * production loss/hour. |
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Example: If the warning sign for motor oil in a car were defected, it would not be obvious that an FBM action would be initiated. This situation can be modeled using this field Hidden. By default, failure should be dealt with immediately by applying the linked FBM action. If the option Hidden has been set to true, failure would not be noticed during simulation, so no FBM action would be initiated. Especially for security and back-up systems it is common that failures will occur unnoticed. With this option set to true, while a failure would cause a downtime of 100%, this would mean that the whole serial section the failure is part of would be taken down. The section would only come back up when a preventive maintenance action would be applied to the failure. In general, this situation does not occur in availability calculations (those types of failures would be signaled immediately), but in models for security calculations. |
Tip: For each failure cause, in order to calculate criticality, Asset Strategy Optimization will require at least one FBM (Failure Based Maintenance) to be defined.