Using data mining technology to explore causes of inaccurate reliability data and suggestions for maintenance management

Reliability data reflects equipment safety and provides a reference for setting inspection period, thereby serving as crucial information for the implementation of equipment integrity management policies. The calculation foundation of reliability data is maintenance records of adequate data quality. However, maintenance records of doubtful quality are common. Despite excluding poor quality recodes and using only the remaining maintenance recodes to calculate the reliability data, the calculated results generally lack a sufficient degree of confidence. This study applied data mining technology, including quality metrics, the association rule, and clustering, to explore the cause of low-quality maintenance data. The results revealed that the low data quality of maintenance records was due to ineffective maintenance policies, the low integrity of key system columns, nonadherence to the policy, and misunderstanding of column definitions. The proposed method successfully identified the causes of low-quality maintenance records. By incorporating the method into the function module of a CMMS, operators can equip the system with self-diagnosis, self-supervision, and continuous optimization functions.