Dr Bhupesh Kumar Lad

"Machine Tool Reliability" is a book authored by Dr. Bhupesh Kumar Lad - Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, IIT Indore, Dr. Divya Shrivastava -Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering (SoE) , The Shiv Nadar University and Prof. Makarand S. Kulkarni Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Bombay

Failure of machine tools not only jeopardizes users' ability to meet their deadlines but also leads to poor product quality, slower production, increased downtime losses, etc. Poor reliability and improper maintenance of a machine tool greatly increase the life cycle cost for the users.

Thus, the treatise Machine Tool Reliability and its real world applications are of great appeal to machine tool designers, production engineers, and maintenance managers. The book serves as a consolidated volume on various dimensions of machine tool reliability and its implications from manufacturers' and users' points of view.

From the manufacturers' point of view, it discusses various approaches for reliability and maintenance-based design of machine tools. In specific, it discusses the simultaneous selection of optimal reliability configuration and maintenance schedules, maintenance optimization under various maintenance scenarios, and cost-based FMEA.

From the users' point of view, it explores the role of machine tool reliability in shop floor level decision-making. In specific, it shows how to model the interactions of machine tool reliability with production scheduling, maintenance scheduling, and process quality control.

Dr.Bhupesh Kumar Lad - Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering, IIT Indore , Co-author of the book "Machine Tool Reliability" in an exclusive interview with Pro MFG spoke from a writer's point of view:

One of the important aspects of the book is that, while modelling the machine tool reliability, it defines the failures of the machine tools from users’ perspective. Of course, mutually agreeable terms are considered between machine tool manufacture and users.

For example, it even considers the failure of a machine tool, when the machine is actually working but the process is shifted due to the degradation or the failure of any of the components of the machine tool resulting in more rejections than the normal. Thus, the failure definition is closer to the users. This definition of failure is then used to model the performance characteristics of the machine tools like OEE, Cost Per Piece (CPP), and throughput. These models are used by the machine tool manufacturers for machine tool design from the reliability and maintenance point of view.

We also discussed in the book how to use these models for optimizing the shop floor policies pertaining to quality, production and maintenance. This helps in more accurate decision making by the users at their shop floor. Moreover, integrated operations planning is also discussed. This is an important aspect for next generation factory concept viz. industry 4.0, which talks about integrated or connected organization. Thus, the book is very important or even relevant from the perspective of next-generation manufacturing systems.

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