The Coast Guard currently determines when a diesel engine should be overhauled based on the results of the Diesel Engine Monitoring Program, Navy Oil Analysis Program, Full Power Trials, and especially engine operating hours. In an effort to reduce costs, the Coast Guard is considering shifting their preventative maintenance to a condition-based system to reduce labor and downtime. To accomplish this goal, an analysis of the criteria used to indicate when a diesel engine should be overhauled must be performed. Before any statistical analysis can be conducted, an extensive amount of data must be collected on main diesel engines. This paper addresses the problem of creating a computer database to collect engine failure data for the USCG. We have conducted a review of several current shipboard reliability databases along with a look at modern developments in this area. This knowledge was used in the creation of a fully functional USCG prototype database using Microsoft Access 95 software called DEREL (Diesel Engine RELiability database). The DEREL database is implementable immediately in order to speed the initiation of data collection for future uses.
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Moore et al. (1999) studied this question.