Optimizing Maintenance to Manage the Major Accident Risk

Major accidents pose a major challenge to the hydrocarbon and chemical process industries due to their devastating consequences to humans, assets and the environment. Maintenance, though beneficial in keeping in form the barriers dedicated to the prevention of major accidents, may increase the major accident risk through reduced or increased frequency of barrier maintenance and exposure of maintenance personnel off the most favorable level. Hence, there is the need to optimize maintenance in order to minimize the major accident risk. Existing approaches to maintenance optimization tend to focus more on optimization with respect to cost, with safety primarily being a constraint in the optimization process. However, the main objective of this paper is to develop a basis for maintenance optimization which applies optimization with respect to the major accident risk. The paper builds on a thorough review of literature, including literature on maintenance optimization and exposure of personnel to major accident hazards.