Nuclear Power Plant Maintenance Optimisation: Models, Methods & Strategies

Abstract

Maintenance activities are very important for the complex and high-risk installations, especially for Nuclear Power Plant. Good maintenance will be able to minimise loss of production, reducing the cost of the electricity generation, and/or reducing the risk. However, there are many issues to make a good maintenance program, such as regarding limitation of reliability data, the complexity of the system, (in)dependency failure mechanism, unpredictable spare parts supply chain, accessibility for maintenance and repair, environmental limitation, human resources, management, regulation, etc. Many studies have been done by researchers and engineers from various sectors to optimising maintenance activities. We have studied several kinds of available literatures, especially that can be used for the nuclear industry. By using proposed maintenance framework, we would like to describe Nuclear Power Plant maintenance optimisation studies that have been done systematically. We also did a critical review and gap identification between scholar studies and real applications and then classified them to provide more easy understanding information that can be used as an information for the future development. Based on our study, there is a wide gap between academic study and implementation. Although many models, methods, and strategies have been proposed, most of the NPPs in the world are using traditional approach by following time-based and breakdown maintenance strategies. There are such kinds of factors, such as because of the regulatory framework barrier, weak relationships between stakeholders and regarding data availability. Future studies to explore those problems are needed.