Criticality analysis of a production facility using cost importance measures

Abstract

When the estimated plant performance is inadequate, it is necessary to use appropriate methodologies and tools for production performance improvement with the minimum effort and cost in the design and/or operation phase. Hence, the concept of importance measure can be used for this purpose. It can be used to determine which components can be improved first in order to get the largest improvement in system performance. Within the system RAM (reliability, availability and maintainability) analysis, the Birnbaum importance analysis plays an important role in the performance improvement program. When both the components’ reliability and maintainability factors are considered in the importance measure analysis, it is noted that the component/system Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) is too short compared with component/system MTTR. Thus, it is necessary to bring the cost factors into the importance measure. This paper proposes a cost importance measure which considers both the reliability and the maintainability information of a system. Then, this cost importance measure is studied in a simple oil and gas production system.