Maintenance of Smart Buildings using Fault Trees
This work provides a practical framework for maintenance planning in smart buildings, but it is an incremental application of existing FMT formalism to a new domain.
The paper applies Fault Maintenance Trees (FMTs) to smart buildings, encoding them into Continuous Time Markov Chains to evaluate dependability metrics and maintenance costs. For a Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning system, they compare different maintenance strategies, showing the framework's utility for balancing cost and dependability.
Timely maintenance is an important means of increasing system dependability and life span. Fault Maintenance trees (FMTs) are an innovative framework incorporating both maintenance strategies and degradation models and serve as a good planning platform for balancing total costs (operational and maintenance) with dependability of a system. In this work, we apply the FMT formalism to a {Smart Building} application and propose a framework that efficiently encodes the FMT into Continuous Time Markov Chains. This allows us to obtain system dependability metrics such as system reliability and mean time to failure, as well as costs of maintenance and failures over time, for different maintenance policies. We illustrate the pertinence of our approach by evaluating various dependability metrics and maintenance strategies of a Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning system.