Reliability Data Collection and Analysis

The ever increasing public demand and the setting-up of national and international legislation on safety assessment of potentially dangerous plant require that a correspondingly increased effort be devoted by regulatory bodies and industrial organisations to collect reliability data in order to produce safety analyses. Reliability data are also needed to assess availability of plant and services and to improve quality of production processes, in particular, to meet the needs of plant operators and/or designers regarding maintenance planning, production availability, etc.
The need for an educational effort in the field of data acquisition and processing has been stressed within the framework of EuReDatA, an association of organisations operating reliability data banks.
This association aims to promote data exchange and pooling of data between organisations and to encourage the adoption of compatible standards and basic definitions for a consistent exchange of reliability data. Such basic definitions are considered to be essential in order to improve data quality.
To cover issues directly linked to the above areas ample space is devoted to the definition of failure events, common cause and human error data, feedback of operational and disturbance data, event data analysis, lifetime distributions, cumulative distribution functions, density functions, Bayesian inference methods, multivariate analysis, fuzzy sets and possibility theory, etc.
Improving the coherence of data entries in the widest possible distributed sense is paramount to the usefulness of such databanks for safety analysts, operators, legislators as much as designers and it is hoped that in this context the present collection of state-of-the-art presentations can stimulate further refinements in the many areas of application.

Inhalt

Presentation of EuReDatA; needs and use of data collections and analysis; reliability, availability, maintainability definitions - objectives of data collection and analysis; inventory and failure data; reliability data collection and its quality control; FACTS - a data base for industrial safety; reliability data collection system in the telecommunication field; the component event data base - a tool for collecting and organizing information on NPPs component behaviour; predictions of flow availability for offshore oil production platforms; an analysis of accidents with casualities in the schemical industry based on the historical facts; systematic analysis and feedback of plant disturbance data; procedures for using expert judgment in risk analysis; on the combination of evidence in various mathematical frameworks; failure rate estimation based on data from different environments and with varying quality; operation data banks at EDF; RCM - closing the loop between design and operation reliability; EuReData benchmark exercise on data analysis; demonstration of failure data bank, failure data analysis, reliability parameter bank and data retrieval.