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Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) are two important KPI's in plant
maintenance.
Mean Time Between Failures & Mean Time To Repair - What do these mean?
“Mean Time” means, statistically, the average time.
“Mean Time Between Failures” (MTBF) is literally the average time elapsed from one failure to the next.
Usually people think of it as the average time that something works until it fails and needs to be repaired
(again).
“Mean Time To Repair” (MTTR) is the average time that it takes to repair something after a failure.
For something that cannot be repaired, the correct term is “Mean Time To Failure” (MTTF). Some would
define MTBF – for repair-able devices – as the sum of MTTF plus MTTR. (MTBF = MTTF + MTTR). In
other words, the mean time between failures is the time from one failure to another. This distinction is
important if the repair time (MTTR) is a significant fraction of MTTF.
Here is an example. A light bulb in a chandelier is not repairable, so MTTF is most appropriate. (The light
bulb will be replaced). The MTTF might be 10,000 hours.
On the other hand, without oil changes, an automobile’s engine may fail after 150 hours of highway driving –
that is the MTTF. Assuming 6 hours to remove and replace the engine (MTTR), MTBF is 150 + 6 = 156
hours.
Like automobiles, most manufacturing equipment will be repaired, rather than replaced after a failure, so
MTBF is the more appropriate measurement.
What is a Failure?
“Failure” can have multiple meanings. Let us briefly examine one device’s “failures”:
An Uninterruptible Power Source (UPS) may have five functions under two conditions:
What is Availability?
The “availability” of a device is, mathematically, MTBF / (MTBF + MTTR) for scheduled working time.
The automobile in the earlier example is available for 150/156 = 96.2% of the time. The repair is
unscheduled down time.
With an unscheduled half-hour oil change every 50 hours – when a dashboard indicator alerts the driver –
availability would increase to 50/50.5 = 99%.
If oil changes were properly scheduled as a maintenance activity, then availability would be 100%.
A production schedule that includes down time for preventative maintenance can accurately predict total
production. Schedules that ignore MTBF and MTTR are simply future disasters awaiting remediation.
Uptime_moment: the moment at which a machine began operating (initially or after a repair)
Downtime_moment: the moment at which a machine failed after operating since the previous uptime-
moment
So each Time Between Failure (TBF) is the difference between one Uptime_moment observation and the
subsequent Downtime_moment.
n = Number of observations.
ui = This is the ith Uptime_moment
di = This is the ith Downtime_moment following the ith Uptime_moment
So MTBF = Sum (di – ui)/ n , for all i = 1 through n observations. More simply, it is the total working time
divided by the number of failures.
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