Ontology-based framework for maintenance activity analysis and support: a case study for petroleum plant

Abstract

In most modern production plants, there has been increased implementation of effective plant maintenance management systems. In the last decade, a large number of studies have been conducted and a wide array of software packages has been developed for optimizing and managing plant maintenance activities. The main focus of most of these studies and systems is to manage the plant maintenance costs at high level management. instead of improving the maintenance activities at the plant elements. These systems have been successful in providing valuable assistance to plant management to manage maintenance activities at a high level. However, an effective plant maintenance analysis module concerning plant maintenance components is still in demand in many production plants. It is also vitally important to provide decision support to stakeholders for the efficient and effective maintenance of the production process. This paper presents an analytical framework that provide the stakeholders the flexibility in making maintenance decisions based on the information collected through plant monitoring process and from the plant maintenance work order history. In our previous work, we designed and implemented two stages of our proposed framework using ontology and business rules which allows to define the logical structure and maintenance operation of a production plant with the objective of improving the plant maintenance activities. To include maintenance benchmark, maintenance analyser dashboard and maintenance decision support components, we have extended the ontology and the framework to ensure that decision makers have sufficient knowledge to make the right decision at the right time. The proposed extended framework is designed, implemented and evaluated using an example petroleum production plant as a case study.