A model for operational risk of industrial facilities including ageing/test degradation effects and maintenance effectiveness

Abstract

The paper presents a model for operational risk of industrial facilities with applications to nuclear power plants and uranium mining. The traditional models update the risk profile for specific operational conditions setting to one the failure probability of components which are known to be unavailable by failure or maintenance, while constant mean unavailability values from the original Probabilistic Safety Analysis (PSA) are kept for the rest. The proposed methodology considers the time dependency of standby failure probabilities through instantaneous unavailability models, depending on the specific standby time for each component at the given moment, instead of using the same constant values. It also incorporates ageing, testing degradation effects and maintenance effectiveness, not explicitly considered in traditional models, as well as the instantaneous reevaluation of common cause failure probabilities. The results show significant risk underestimations when components specific standby times, ageing, testing degradation effects and maintenance effectiveness are not considered.