The key steps in performing RAM study are:
- Identification of essential systems and equipment that contribute to the injection availability
- Gathering of Reliability Data
- Construction of Reliability Block Diagrams (RBDs)
- Development of RAM Model using MAROS
- Identification of critical system or equipment that contribute downtime
The system and equipment that contribute to the overall availability are identified and considered for the development of logical Reliability Block Diagrams (RBDs). Those system and equipment are selected and considered to be essential, where the failure of the system or equipment concerned could result in downtime of the facility that is resulting in loss of production. The essential systems identified would contribute towards the overall production availability. Essential equipment identified for each essential system, upon failure could affect the availability of the overall system, depending upon the equipment configuration and redundancies present.
The selection of reliability data (failure rates and repair hours) will be based on the type of the equipment used and the failure mode of the selected equipment.
The main process and utility systems of the facility are reviewed and the RBDs are constructed for each system, based on the Process Flow Diagrams (PFDs), Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs), Block Flow Diagrams (BFDs) and Utility Flow Diagrams (UFDs).
RAM model will be developed and based on the output of the RAM model, the system and the equipment in the facility will be ranked based on its criticality i.e. the equipment having the highest unavailability being the most critical and vice versa. The criticality ranking of equipment can then be used as input in the development of the maintenance plan for the facility.