Development of a RBI Tool for Inspection Management in Chemical Plants

The increasing complexity of chemical and petrochemical installations and in of oil and gas operations, jointed with the growing sensibility to ensure higher levels of safety, have increased the sensibility of the designers and operators to find innovative solutions to ensure safe as well as economically viable operation. It has become crucial to manage operational risk through the use of effective technology and best practices for inspection and maintenance planning. Literature shows several models and methods for taking into account managerial and organizational factor in risk analysis, as Integrates Safety Method (Modarres et al, 1992), WPAM – Work Process Analysis Model (Davoudian et al, 1994), Integrated Risk (Papazoglou et al, 2003), ARAMIS (Salvi and Debray, 2005) etc. A new approach, described by Milazzo et al. ( 2010), is based on the influence of risk prevention measures on the frequency of failure. An innovative methodology recently proposed by Milazzo and Aven (2012), focuses the need for extending the risk's approach to the concept of uncertainty. The development of these innovating methodologies need of further studies and developments, but are very promising for future approach of this problems. Actually, for risk assessment practice in the chemical plant, one of the highest benefit maintenance methodologies is Risk Based Inspection (RBI). The use of a RBI analysis is very important phase to plan the inspection activity. The problem of collecting data that characterizes this analysis is overcome with the help of software inspection manager that encloses all functionalities for an easier management of technical data in the Plant's Inspection. The main target of this paper is to add a new software tool that allows expert technical users to proceed a RBI study compliant to the API standards. The results of the new tool of Inspection Manager for RBI permits to carry out easier the inspection plan. The software permits a guided procedure for the insertion of the data necessary for the analysis, and then the analysis is easier and faster. The identification of risk derives from range proposed by API 581. In the case of not standard operations, the operator can be update the data and, thanks to the saving of the previous analysis to minimize the inserting of repetitive data, the RBI session turns out to be simpler and faster.