June 2021 Issue
Topics

Insights into modern reliability engineering

Lu Jin,
Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics, UEC Tokyo

“My research is based on reliability engineering,” says Lu Jin, an associate professor at the Department of Informatics, UEC Tokyo. “I am working on maintenance planning to study a wide range of systems for ensuring the safety and security of our society. The interest of my research is developing decision-making models for realizing more flexible and efficient maintenance plan while maintaining high reliability and safety.”

Jin is developing decision-making models for systems focused on optimizing problems for maintenance plans such as periodic maintenance and condition monitoring maintenance.

Specifically, Jin wants to reduce maintenance costs while maintaining reliability levels by dynamically adjusting and controlling maintenance plans based on monitoring information on operating systems. A maintenance plan that uses the Markov decision process as the core model, takes into consideration the effects of direct and indirect measurement of system deterioration, measurement accuracy, changes in the operating environment, and so on, and yields a trade-off between maintenance costs and failure losses.

Recent research results on maintenance decisions that take into account the uncertainty and changes in information being monitored.

  • Effective utilization of maintenance opportunities with incomplete information (Awarded prizes at the Japan Quality Control Society and ANQ2019 international conference. Scheduled to be published in TQS Journal)
  • Economically optimal maintenance plan based on continuous deterioration process (maintenance planning)
  • Periodic inspection plan with variable cycles

“I'm also working on joint research with colleagues at Mälardalens University in Sweden, on using existing maintenance optimization methods in other fields such as pricing options and examining investment strategies. This is an exciting area of research.”

The important point is that this system includes entertaining games that children enjoy playing and thereby wear the spectacles continuously for periods of times that are much longer than eye-patches.

“We worked with globally renowned game making companies to design enjoyable games for children,” says Ishigaki. “Our system has a wide range of games and special glasses catering for children of all ages.”

References

  • Optimizing Opportunistic Maintenance by Using a Semi-Markov Decision Process, Odajima, Y. and Jin, L. Total Quality Science 2021 (In press)
  • Optimal Policy for Periodic Inspections with Flexible Imperfect Inspection Frequencies, Jin, L., Koyama, N. and Yamamoto, W. Total Quality Science 4/ 3, 128-137, 2018.
  • Approximate Log-Linear Cumulative Exposure Time Scale Model by Joint Moment Generating Function of Covariates, Yamamoto, W. and Jin, L. Frontiers in Statistical Quality Control 12, 327-339, 2018.
  • Optimal Inspection Policy for Scheduled Maintenance of Aging Systems, Jin, L. and Yamamoto, W. International Journal of Industrial Engineering: Theory, Applications and Practice 24/ 4, 99-111, 2017.
  • Optimal Control Limit Policy for Age-Dependent Deteriorating Systems, Jin, L., Bayarsaikhan, U. and Suzuki, K. Journal of Risk and Reliability 230/ 1, 34-43, 2016. DOI:10.1177/1748006X15589208
  • Optimal Maintenance Policy for Aging Systems Under Non-stationary Markov Deterioration, Jin, L. Journal of the Japanese Society for Quality Control 45/ 4, 65-73, 2015.
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