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The purpose of this study is to focus on identifying building elements with design defects and established the relationship between design defects and difficulties in carrying out maintenance works.

A total of four cases have been selected covering primary‐ and secondary‐level for both National and National‐type schools (commonly known as vernacular schools). Interviews with school management were carried out throughout the study to assess the common design defects in the buildings.

A list of the design defects that have caused high maintenance cost was tabulated. It could be concluded that the most common design defects are building façade and missing slot underneath the floor slab which led to more defects.

Only four schools in Penang, Malaysia were involved in this study. Data were gathered from the school management and maintenance personnel. No data have been obtained from the designers because difficulties in tracing the designers record since the school age are more than 20 years.

The study recommended that expert maintenance personnel shall be employed in the design stage to minimize design defects in school projects which in turn minimize the cost of building maintenance.

Safety and health of the students could be affected if there is no accurate measures being adopted to overcome the issue.

A very limited study has been carried out with regards to design maintenance for school buildings in Malaysia.

Maintainability is the ability of a product system to be maintained and is a design characteristic. The paper aims to provide an integrated system for complex product maintainability design and verification. It includes processes and tools that can be effectively used to plan, quantify and cost maintenance.

An integrated platform for maintainability design and verification is designed. A case‐based reasoning method of maintainability design and Extensible Markup Language‐based representation of maintenance procedure information are presented.

The paper finds that the proposed system is an efficient tool for complex product maintainability design and verification.

Early and effective planning and implementation of a maintainability program can significantly improve the reliability and availability of product system.

A desktop virtual reality application for product maintainability design and verification is presented.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the design for maintenance accessibility (DFMA) method, and the opportunities offered by the application of building information modeling (BIM) software to accomplish this design.

In this paper definitions of DFMA are investigated, different BIM tools including Solibri Model Checker (SMC) and Revit Add-in are explored for maintainability problems. Microsoft Visual Studio is used as a tool to develop Add-in applications in Revit for DFMA problem. A case study involving exhaust fan maintenance accessibility is used to validate the proposed solution.

Maintenance accessibility tends to be ignored in the design phase. The process of clash detection among building components does not ordinarily detect accessibility issues. SMC can help partially solve this problem if there is a corresponding SMC rule sets available. As a 3D modeling tool associated with a parametric database of components, Revit offers opportunities for designers to explore the background geometry and parametric database to add more functions in the form of Add-in applications which can help facilities managers anticipate and solve maintenance accessibility issues.

The add-in tools developed for this paper and the rules used for SMC are specific for the case study. A more general and comprehensive tool or rule set will be the direction for a future study.

This study shows that maintainability checking is possible in the design phase. Comprehensive maintainability checking in the design phase would result in a big savings in maintenance cost during a facility's lifecycle.

The paper illustrates with a case study using two different tools the process of accessibility checking for maintenance in the design phase, which transforms the concept of “design for maintenance accessibility” into reality.

This paper proposes a new simultaneous optimization model of the industrial systems design and maintenance. This model aims to help the designer in searching for technical solutions and the product architecture by integrating the maintenance issues from the design stage. The goal is to reduce the life-cycle cost (LCC) of the studied system.

Literature indicates that the different approaches used in the design for maintenance (DFM) methods are limited to the simultaneous characterization of the reliability and the maintainability of a multicomponent system as well as the modeling of the dynamic maintenance. This article proposes to go further in the optimization of the product, by simultaneously characterizing the design, in terms of reliability and maintainability, as well as the dynamic planning of the maintenance operations. This combinatorial characterization is performed by a two-level hybrid algorithm based on the genetic algorithms.

The proposed tool offers, depending on the life-cycle expectation, the desired availability, the desired business model (sales or rental), simulations in terms of the LCCs, and so an optimal product architecture.

In this article, the term “design” is limited to reliability properties, possible redundancies, component accessibility (maintainability), and levels of monitoring information.

This work is distinguished by the use of a hybrid optimization algorithm (two-level computation) using genetic algorithms. The first level is to identify an optimal design configuration that takes into account the LCC criterion. The second level consists in proposing a dynamic and optimal maintenance plan based on the maintenance-free operating period (MFOP) concept that takes into account certain criteria, such as replacement costs or the reliability of the system.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze parameters that influence direct maintenance cost (DMC) in the civil aircraft operational phase. Reducing direct maintenance cost of civil aircrafts is one of the important ways to improve economy. DMC prediction can provide decision support for the optimization of the design parameters optimization to realize the objection in decreasing the maintenance cost, and it can also improve the aircraft competitiveness.

The paper analyzes some parameters comprehensively, which influence DMC in the civil aircraft’s operational phase. Based on the analysis of the influential parameters and the characteristics of data in the period of civil aircraft’s designing period, the paper presents prediction support method based on fuzzy support vector machine (FSVM) and realizes quantitative forecast of DMC in the aircraft design phase.

The paper presents the process of DMC analysis and model in the aircraft design phase, the DMC prediction model is used in newly developed aircrafts.

The numerical examples using B737NP fleet data in the paper have proved the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The paper establishes the prediction model of civil aircraft DMC based on FSVM. The model can handle fuzzy data and small sample data which contain noise. The results prove that the method can satisfy the demand of the real data in civil aircraft designing.

Effective building maintenance management is vital for reducing the impact of building defects and costly building maintenance work. Such practice significantly contributes to the public sector in terms of cost reduction, improved effectiveness and efficiency in maintenance works, increasing safety and well-being of the occupants, expanding the life of building stocks and expanding the value of investment for the government building assets. The maintenance practice in Malaysia is still emerging in comparison to many developed nations. The purpose of this study is to determine the current scenario of the building maintenance approach at the design stage in public buildings in Malaysia.

An extensive questionnaire survey was held, involving 312 key players (38 per cent out of 820 predetermined participants) in Malaysia.

The analysis showed that building maintenance in public building in Malaysia still uses the reactive approach. Despite the Malaysian Government’s adoption of a proactive maintenance approach, unfortunately, there are some misunderstandings among the key players regarding the approach. The research results demonstrate that the key players had a lack of understanding on the concept of the proactive maintenance management approach and that they were either ignorant or had insufficient awareness of proactive maintenance approach.

The contribution of this study is useful for the government to adopt a more proactive building maintenance policy at the design stage, to give awareness on proactive building maintenance to the key players in their construction project and as a guide to the key players to adopt a maintenance plan at the design stage of work.

Heating, ventilating, air-conditioning and cooling (HVAC) systems are crucial in daily health-care facility services. Design-related defects can lead to maintenance issues, causing service disruptions and cost overruns. These defects can be avoided if a link between the early design stages and maintenance feedback is established. This study aims to use experts’ experience in HVAC maintenance in health-care facilities to list and evaluate the risk of each maintenance issue caused by a design defect, supported by the literature.

Following semistructured interviews with experts, 41 maintenance issues were identified as the most encountered issues. Subsequently, a survey was conducted in which 44 participants evaluated the probability and impact of each design-caused issue.

Chillers were identified as the HVAC components most prone to design defects and cost impact. However, air distribution ducts and air handling units are the most critical HVAC components for maintaining healthy conditions inside health-care facilities.

The unavailability of comprehensive data on the cost impacts of all design-related defects from multiple health-care facilities limits the ability of HVAC designers to furnish case studies and quantitative approaches.

This study helps HVAC designers acquire prior knowledge of decisions that may have led to unnecessary and avoidable maintenance. These design-related maintenance issues may cause unfavorable health and cost consequences.

The purpose of this research is to show that reliability analysis and its implementation will lead to an improved whole life performance of the building systems, and hence their life cycle costs (LCC).

This paper analyses reliability impacts on the whole life cycle of building systems, and reviews the up‐to‐date approaches adopted in UK construction, based on questionnaires designed to investigate the use of reliability within the industry.

Approaches to reliability design and maintainability design have been introduced from the operating environment level, system structural level and component level, and a scheduled maintenance logic tree is modified based on the model developed by Pride. Different stages of the whole life cycle of building services systems, reliability‐associated factors should be considered to ensure the system's whole life performance. It is suggested that data analysis should be applied in reliability design, maintainability design, and maintenance policy development.

The paper presents important factors in different stages of the whole life cycle of the systems, and reliability and maintainability design approaches which can be helpful for building services system designers. The survey from the questionnaires provides the designers with understanding of key impacting factors.

Product design and service delivery both affect service performance, and therefore a product support strategy must be defined during design stage, in terms of these two dimensions, to ensure the delivery of “promised product performance” to customers. Furthermore, product support strategy should not only be focused around product, or its operating characteristics, but also on assisting customers with services that enhance product use and add additional value to their business processes. This paper examines various issues such as reliability, availability, maintainability, and supportability (RAMS), etc., which directly or indirectly affect product support, maintenance needs and related costs on the basis of a case study conducted in a manufacturing company. The main purpose of the study was to analyse the critical issues related to the product support and service delivery strategy as being practised by the company, and to suggest means for improvements. On the basis of the case study, the paper presents an approach for design and development of product support and maintenance concepts for industrial systems in a multinational environment. The paper emphasizes that the strategy for product support should not be centred only on “product”, but should also take into account important issues such as the service delivery capability of the manufacturers, service suppliers, the capability of users' maintenance organization, etc.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the fundamental factors influencing maintenance costs of logistic buildings and to provide benchmark indications for designing maintenance efficient warehouses that contribute to the enhancement of business performance.

The relations between factors and indicators of building facilities maintenance costs are examined using regression analysis of a dataset collected from about 100 distribution warehouses leased by a leading global freight provider throughout Italy.

Maintenance cost reduction can only be achieved by making appropriate design decisions on the strategic characteristics of warehouse facilities. In particular, the location and the age of a building are relevant factors of breakdown maintenance, while the monthly volume of freight transiting the warehouse is a significant cost factor of maintenance due to damage.

This paper is limited to logistic service providing organisations, has local impact, and does not consider operational requirements in suggesting design criteria. Further research may gainfully generalise the model by examining other businesses, geographical areas and industrial operations issues. Leasing and frequently relocating facilities have emerged as appropriate distribution management strategies to control location, size and age of a building, and thus to face dynamic business conditions.

This paper provides maintenance cost benchmarks and supports design decision making of distribution warehouse facilities.