Publications

Risk Based approaches for planning and development of asset management strategies have during the last decade emerged as effective means to optimize spending on asset integrity whilst managing safety and business risk. The more advanced quantitative methods allow prediction of the effect of changes to inspection, maintenance and operation on the plant risk profile assisting development of risk cost optimized maintenance routines.The question is how do we integrate these individual methods and software tools that apply to different groups of plant equipment?This paper introduces the concept of Risk Based Maintenance (RBM) developed by DNV. This concept integrates Risk Based Inspection (RBI) for pressure containing equipment, Management of Safety Critical Equipment by Safety Integrity Level Assessment (SIL) for E/E/PES (Electrical/Electronic / Programmable Electronic Systems) and other safety related functions and a streamlined approach to Reliability Centered Maintenance planning (RCM) for rotating, electrical and control systems.To justify application of these methodologies and the integrated Risk Based Maintenance concept this paper reviews recent historic data on cost of accidents in hydrocarbon plants and the root causes of large property damage losses. The root causes can often be traced back to poorly implemented process safety management, lack of risk assessments, poor mechanical integrity systems and insufficient maintenance and inspection of business and safety critical equipment.The paper discusses requirements to software for managing the massive amount of data and software needs for successful asset integrity management and implementation of Risk Based Maintenance. The need for interfacing the RBI/RCM software with the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), inspection management system and the overall enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is emphasised.