As the complexity of manufacturing systems keeps escalating, the maintenance decision making becomes increasingly challenging. Simulation has become an effective way to avoid costly decisions through what-if analysis of different maintenance policies, and maintenance schedules before their actual implementation. In this paper, a new modularizedsimulationpackage formanufacturingproductionsystems...

Improper and unnecessary maintenance actions can result in a waste of resources, time, and money. Training and education play a vital role in maintenance implementation and can be used to prevent improper maintenance procedures. The Center for Predictive Maintenance (CPM) has developed a demonstration framework and tool that can be used to educate and train users extending from maintainers to l...

The paper deals with possibilities of maintenance optimisation of k-out-of-n systems. The first part of the paper briefly analyses influence of preventive maintenance concept on reliability of k-out-of-n system and presents possibilities of preventive maintenance optimisation with respect to maintenance costs. The second part of the paper presents a suggested method of maintenance optimisation ...

The U.S. Supreme Court will decide later this year whether to let stand decisions by two appeals courts permitting doctors to help terminally ill patients commit suicide. The Ninth and Second Circuit Courts of Appeals last spring held that state laws in Washington and New York that ban assistance in suicide were unconstitutional as applied to doctors and their dying patients. If the Supreme Cou...

The recent Supreme Court decision of Queensland v B [2008] 2 Qd R 562 has significant implications for the law that governs consent and abortions. The judgment purports to extend the ratio of Secretary, Department of Health and Community Services (NT) v JWB and SMB (1992) 175 CLR 218 (Marion's Case) and impose a requirement of court approval for terminations of pregnancy for minors who are not ...

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 forever changed the face of electoral equality in the United States. Today, almost forty years later, the Act is considered one of the most pivotal pieces of federal legislation in our country’s history and the “most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted.” Congress has revisited various segments of the Act ave times since its enactment. A key 19...

For two decades, clinicians have been guided by an agreement about the appropriate use of artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH). In general, ANH has been seen as a medical treatment that patients or their surrogates may accept or refuse on the basis of the same considerations that guide all other treatment decisions: the potential benefits, risks, and discomfort of the treatment and the reli...

The recording and management of design rationales and design decisions are important issues in achieving better support for software maintenance. In the c ontext of existing work on design rationale models, this paper intr oduc es an appr oach to the integration of system design, design decisions and design rationales and the formalisation of design decisions in terms of software artifacts and ...

An age replacement maintenance policy is considered here, in which a system is restored whenever it fails, or ages without failure up to a preventive maintenance epoch (whichever comes first). The duration of the restoration activity is random, and depends on whether it was precipitated by a failure or by a preventive maintenance action. The case where the preventive maintenance epoch is determ...