Plant maintenance planification method and apparatus

• Main Authors: KODAMA, HIROTSUGU, HARADA, SHIGERU, HIRASAWA, TAIJI, FUJIYAMA, KAZUNARI, MINOWA, MASANORI, ISHII, FUMIHARU, SUDO, MAMORU, NAGAI, SATOSHI, IWAHASHI, TAKAYUKI, SAITO, KAZUHIRO, FUJIWARA, TOSHIHIRO, ASATSU, SEIICHI, KICHISE, HITOSHI, OKAZAKI, MITSUYOSHI
• Format: Patent
• Language: English; French; German
• Published: 27.07.2005
• Edition: 7
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTING; CONTROL OR REGULATING SYSTEMS IN GENERAL; CONTROLLING; COUNTING; DATA PROCESSING SYSTEMS OR METHODS, SPECIALLY ADAPTED FORADMINISTRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL, SUPERVISORYOR FORECASTING PURPOSES; FUNCTIONAL ELEMENTS OF SUCH SYSTEMS; MONITORING OR TESTING ARRANGEMENTS FOR SUCH SYSTEMS ORELEMENTS; PHYSICS; REGULATING; SYSTEMS OR METHODS SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE,COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL, SUPERVISORY OR FORECASTINGPURPOSES, NOT OTHERWISE PROVIDED FOR

An apparatus for maintaining plant equipment incorporates: an input unit to receive information on targets and ranges of plant equipment to be maintained, that constitute a plant, inspection information and operation-history information; a failure-event tree breakdown unit to perform tree-breakdown on failures to be expected from events to be inspected; a failure-unreliability function calculation unit to calculate unreliability of each item in the failure-event tree breakdown; a failure-derived monetary loss calculation unit to multiply each unreliability and a cost of recovery from each event to be inspected and accumulate results of multiplication in accordance with the failure-event tree breakdown, thus obtaining a recovery cost; a preventive maintenance expense calculation unit to calculate preventive maintenance expenses for preventing failure events; and a maintenance decision-making unit to decide maintenance timing and technique through comparison between the recovery cost and the preventive maintenance expenses. The apparatus may further have an inspection-priority item selection unit to select priority items in a failure-event tree stored in a failure-event tree database, as items to be inspected and an inspection unit to inspect the selected items, or a monitoring-item selection unit to select priority items in a failure-event tree stored in a failure-event tree database, as items to be inspected and an on-line monitoring unit to monitor the selected items.