Improving Maintenance Strategy by Physical Asset Management in Petrochemical: Applying Developments in Air Craft Maintenance Considering the use of MFOP instead of MTBF

The aim of this study is to compare the aviation derived reliability metric known as the Maintenance Free Operating Period (MFOP), with the traditionally used, and commonly found, reliability metric Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), which has over the years shown some innate disadvantages in the field of maintenance. It will be shown that this is mainly due to MTBF’s inherent acceptance of failure and the unscheduled maintenance therewith directly connected. Moreover, MFOP is successfully applied to a Petrochemicals specific Case study, as to date, no other application of the MFOP concept to the Petrochemicals sector is known. An extensive literature study is presented, which covers concepts relevant to the overall study and which helps to contextualize the problem, revealing the major shortcomings of the commonly accepted MTBF metric. A methodology to analyze systems MFOP performance, making use of failure statistics to analyze both repairable and non-repairable systems, is presented. Validation makes use of a case study, which applies the MFOP methodology to a system, specifically in the Petrochemicals sector. It was shown that MFOP could be applied to the data obtained from the Petrochemicals sector, producing estimates, which were accurate representations of reality. These findings provide an exciting basis on which to begin to facilitate a paradigm shift in the mindset of maintenance personnel, setting reliability targets and dealing with unscheduled maintenance stops.