Air Liquide TAR optimisation for industrial risk reduction

TAR stands for Turn Around, a term used to indicate the plant shutdown, a critical moment in which all relevant maintenance activities are performed. Decisions on TAR maintenance activities are most of the time based on the background and subjective sensibility of maintenance operators. However, in a company where safety comes first, maintenance decisions should be based on an objective decisional tool that quantifies the reduction of industrial risk as a consequence of a maintenance activity. Air Liquide has hundreds of Air Separation Unit plants all around the world, all based on the same technology and layout, and in Italy, each plant reports all minor and major incidents in an internal reporting program. This large amount of data can be the basis for the design of an objective decisional tool, which could give the maintenance engineer a new quantifiable safety insight in support of TAR maintenance choices. The development of such a method takes place under the Maximo Master Quality Data Preventive Maintenance Project, an international project which aims to standardize all maintenance activities for all Air Liquide plants in France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, through the definition of standardized maintenance plans. The method involves the definition of risk index that can act as an indicator for the choice of maintenance activities and of their frequencies. The risk index is a number, for the single asset and for the entire plant. Minimizing that number means making the best choice on maintenance activities and on the frequency of those activities. Results are based on Air Liquide data, hence, applicable and relevant in the Company context.