Maintenance of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems has become one of the most relevant maintenance operations in public buildings.
The intense interaction among human agents and equipment, aligned with information’s distributed nature, exposes the maintenance workers to significant and complex risks during their routines.
Prescribed procedures frequently differ from reality, which becomes essential the examination of the work-as-done. The functional resonance analysis method (FRAM) offers a promising perspective on analysing work-as-done in daily activities. However, the FRAM brings a limitation due to its complexity of representation.
This study presents a layered FRAM as an alternate way of analysing the work-as-done in the maintenance of HVAC systems.
This approach consists of cutting the couplings among functions in those presenting variability to clarify how the functions affect each other. The results show that the layered FRAM offers a better view of functions, decreasing the complexity and the analyst’s cognitive workload.
This contribution is a user-friendly and straightforward technique to facilitate the model analysis and explore a new perspective to popularize and spread the FRAM to treat complex issues.