After FMECA: Using Vulnerability to Establish a Technical Basis for Maintenance Tasks

Increasing demands on maintenance and operations organization are coupled with the loss of expertise industry-wide — causing many organizations to approach plant maintenance more reactively in spite of past investments in Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) efforts — including Failure Mode Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA). This phenomenon is known as degradation of the maintenance basis. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has developed a method to maintain the investments utilities have made into various maintenance optimization efforts. Utilizing expert elicitation, EPRI has developed modules for 136 different components and a statistical method for measuring degradation and task effectiveness data for each component and rolling those results to the system and the plant level. The end result of a successful analysis is a technical basis for maintenance that is established using quantitative analysis on proven data. This paper will describe a method for vulnerability-based analysis.