Decision support system for reliability analysis of process plant shutdowns

This paper describes a Decision Support System (DSS) to assess the influence of planned and unplanned shutdowns and periodic maintenance activities on the overall reliability of complex industrial plants. The methodology here proposed allows to evaluate the effects of plant shutdown on item reliability. The analysis has been carried out on fifteen process plants of an Italian oil refinery for a three-year period from 2001 to 2003. The outcomes of the analysis show that the plant restart represents an important criticality factor for plant operation from a reliability point of view, highlighting an increase in item failure and the subsequent growth of corrective maintenance costs. The present paper describes the application of a methodology to adjust plant operation start up, whose results, applied to API oil refinery in Falconara Marittima (Ancona, Italy), show an improvement in plant reliability in the year 2003.