MACHINE-TOMACHINE PLATFORM:
EMPOWERING FACILITY MANAGERS TO TAP VALUABLE OPERATIONAL AND ENERGY EFFICIENCIES THROUGH AUTOMATED BUILDING INTELLIGENCE by Ellis G. Guiles, P.E., LEED AP, President, Graboyes Commercial Window Company and Graboyes Smart Buildings To understand the latest automated building intelligence practices and technologies, it’s helpful to consider the context. The context is that right now, a profound evolution is happening in the field of facilities maintenance. The story is an interesting one involving a transition from equipment-centered maintenance to reliabilitycentered maintenance. Did you know that the Douglas DC8, one of the primary passenger planes employed during the 1960s, required approximately four million labor-hours of maintenance between every 20,000-hour overhaul? Compare that workload to the far more complex Boeing 747’s mere 66,000 labor-hours of maintenance required between every 20,000-hour overhaul. How did Boeing reduce the labor-hours required by a factor of 61? They implemented reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). 30 CONSTRUCTION TODAY
RCM: Evolving from equipment perspective to system perspective Reliability-centered maintenance is driven from a system perspective rather than an equipment perspective. As an example, consider an airplane with ten hydraulic control valves. The manufacturer of these valves recommends replacement after every 3,000 hours of flying time. If you follow an equipment-based approach you would simply replace every valve after 3,000 hours. It is very likely in this scenario that most of the replaced valves are still functional when they are replaced. If we take a system approach, we recognize the 3,000 hours is an average lifetime rather than an absolute safety limit. Plus, the probability of all ten valves failing simultaneously is infinitesimally small. So we modify our approach and change only one valve every 3,000 hours, choosing a different valve in a different location each