Knowledge Modeling for Asset Management Evaluation

The long-term management of a production asset raises several major issues among which rank the technical management of the plant, its economics and the fleet level perspective one has to adopt. Decision-makers are therefore faced with the need to define long term policies (up to the end of asset operation), which take into account multiple criteria including safety (which is paramount) and performance. In this paper we remind the reader of the EDF three-level methodology for asset management. As introduced in PVP 2003, this methodology provides decision-makers with indicators to evaluate the status of a plant. The methodology addresses the component/technical level (how to safely operate daily and invest for the future), the plant level (how to translate technical decisions into plant-wide consequences including economic performance) and the fleet level (how to manage a large number of similar assets). Identifying what might occur to ageing plant components, how operations or maintenance decisions might influence these occurrences and what the consequences of these decisions and events might have on plant operation, is definitely an expert task. In order to gather, preserve, share, maintain and exploit this expert knowledge, we therefore relied on a “knowledge modeling” activity. This activity is used to support the asset management evaluation methodology. We detail the knowledge model — an entity/relation expert description of the plant life-management domain — on which our three-level methodology relies. Lastly, we focus on the software tool that implements this model in order to allow decision-makers to define, analyze and evaluate long-term plant operation and maintenance policies.