Published on: 23/04/2013
4-6 September 2013

World Maintenance Forum - Lugano CH - RAMS Session organised by Andrea Carpignano

Risk and Reliability assessments toward maintenance optimization in process plants

The transition from Maintenance to Maintenance Engineering occurred in the last decades led to positive effects in terms of safety, production, environmental protection, asset preservation and brand reputation.
The new maintenance culture is based on the idea that Maintenance engineering is a powerful tool asking for economical and technical investments, both during system design and operations, that are largely refunded by the daily robustness of the system, limiting accidents, critical failures, losses of production, and damages for the Company’s reputation.
The advantages of this new approach can understood only by reasoning according to the two new guidelines in system engineering:
1. Safety, environmental protection, maintainability must be embedded in the system/plant during design and not “applied” when the system is already in operation.
2. Choices, during design and during operations, must be taken according to a “System Life Cycle” paradigm and not using a day by day approach.
A few big Companies are really moving in this direction, a lot of work has to be done for small and medium enterprises.
The new approaches, also addressed by international standards such as the IEC EN 61508, is to embed maintenance considerations since the early stages of system design, relate maintenance policies and activities to the level of risk set as tolerable by the Company management or requested by Public Authorities, join the maintenance planning together with the annual production expected by the operations.
Several new disciplines were born by this new approach: Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), Risk Based Inspection (RBI), Functional Safety, etc.
The goal of this conference session is to integrate all these disciplines into a common framework “maintenance through system life cycle” and to demonstrate by industrial case studies the efficacy of these approaches.