Reliability And Risk Evaluation To Determine Optimum Equipment Criticality Classification

Abstract

Maintenance activities are common and are carried out across all types of fields and industries. The concept of maintenance has undergone multiple changes throughout the past decades due to the increased variety of physical assets and the increasing equipment and complexity to maintain that equipment. Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is one of the maintenance techniques used to improve assets' reliability. In order to define maintenance strategies to maintain the equipment, the criticality of all equipment needs to be defined to understand how important the equipment is to the business. This research aims to Develop an Integrated method to derive optimum Critical Equipment Lists based on Reliability, Risks, and Cost. This will help define an optimized and efficient management maintenance plan for the organizations in different types of fields and industries. The methods used in this research will be utilizing an integration of methods including Failure Mode and Effects Criticality Analysis (FMECA), Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and Optimization technique to optimize the results based on Reliability, Risks, and Costs. The integrated method results were compared with two major oil and gas companies equipment criticalities, and the integrated method results achieved a balance of equipment criticality and were very comparable with current practices used in both major companies. The integrated method achieved balanced results, which were neither too conservative nor too lenient equipment criticalities. The balanced equipment criticalities produced from the method after optimization will help the organizations save on maintenance costs and focus the organization resources and workforce on critical items and reduce the resources spent on less critical items.