A risk-based approach to asset integrity management offers several cost, safety, and productivity benefits.
Efficient asset management has become crucial for organizations to stay competitive in today’s global market. With the current pressure to obtain optimal value from assets, industries are on the edge of a new trend in asset efficiency improvement. Companies are challenged to maintain and often increase operational effectiveness, revenue, and customer satisfaction, while at the same time reducing capital, operating, and support costs.
Many old plant assets are at risk of failure from age-related damage mechanisms that require mitigation actions. It may not be feasible to replace these assets immediately and they may not need to have their useful life extended. Therefore, the common challenge is to maintain production capability in a cost-effective way while preserving the integrity of those assets.
Asset integrity is the ability of an asset to perform its required function effectively while protecting health, safety, and the environment (1). Asset integrity management (AIM) is the means of ensuring that the people, systems, processes, and resources that deliver integrity are in place, in use, and performing when required over the whole lifecycle of the asset.
An effective AIM program ensures that a facility’s equipment and assets are designed, fabricated, procured, installed, and maintained appropriately for their intended application throughout the life of the operation (2–4). AIM provides the foundation for asset performance management (Figure 1) (5).
▲Figure 1. Process safety and occupational safety are at the core of asset integrity management (AIM). AIM relates to an asset’s ability to safely function; asset performance management relates to an asset’s ability to safely function while optimizing performance (5).
AIM focuses on the core elements of safety, environmental protection, reliability, regulatory compliance, and data management (5). This article discusses how to incorporate risk-based methodologies into an AIM program, and explores how digitalization is helping companies to modernize their risk-based inspection workflows...
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