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E
PROCESS EQUIPMENT RELIABILITY DATABASE
The Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), an American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) industry technology alliance, has been facilitating an industry effort whose mission is: Operation of an equipment reliability database, high quality, valid, and useful data to the process analyses to support availability, reliability, and improvements, maintenance strategies, and determination. making available industry enabling equipment design life cycle cost

Multiple companies from the oil, chemical, and industrial gas industries, as well as consultants, insurance companies, and equipment manufacturers joined together to achieve this mission. CCPS is providing an infrastructure to facilitate development and sharing of technical information with respect to an industry process equipment reliability database (PERD). To accomplish its objective, the CCPS has created a forum for participating companies to support and direct this effort (participation in the project does not require membership in CCPS). The participant companies, through representatives on a Steering Committee, are actively involved in the design, implementation, startup, and operation of the database. General meetings are conducted three times per year with smaller working groups meeting monthly and as needed for specific sub projects. The PERD project technology allows the collection of data using a definable and reproducible taxonomy. PERD taxonomies provide a fundamentally sound structure to capture data in a format that allows immediate analysis, facilitating the understanding of what the raw data means or represents. The taxonomy defines data, failure modes, causes, mechanisms, and data field formats needed to calculate key performance metrics. Benefits accrue from being able to aggregate data among multiple plants and companies without degrading its quality. The taxonomies represent the data structure incorporated into the database software developed as part of the PERD initiative. The strategic thrust of the PERD initiative is to: Develop equipment taxonomies to establish the technical foundation for population to a meaningful level of detail,

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Process Equipment Reliability Database Leverage the equipment taxonomies to develop software that supports statistical analysis, Develop an infrastructure so that companies can collect and transfer data to PERD for sharing among the participants, Provide a working forum to assist companies in their effort to provide data to an operational database, and Educate new participants on how to accomplish the above.

Those companies that embrace the PERD thought process and methodologies and then proceed to implement them are in a position to obtain and use "proven in use" data. Benefits of such data are that it: Supports risk decision making, Improves mechanical integrity via quality processes, Verifies safety integrity levels, and Reduces systems engineering costs.

The flow chart in Figure E. 1 illustrates how participants can gain increasing benefits by taking the time to understand the technical foundation and using the tools and aids that have been developed as part of the initiative. Progress to date includes the development and publication of two guidelines books and several taxonomies, many having been made available to the general public. In addition, PERD first generation software has been developed that includes plants, spring operated relief valves and in line centrifugal compressors. The entire work process has been validated via a pilot project that has seen multiple companies take their respective data and map/translate it into a PERD compatible format. The data was then imported, aggregated, and made anonymous for subsequent circulation.

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Figure E.1. PERD Process. Future plans include the development of 2nd generation software intended to be much more robust and to also include instrument loops as part of the database. This addition will support tracking the performance of safety instrumented functions. While this work is underway, another focus is aimed at relief valve data to fully realize operation of the database, enabling fulfillment of the PERD mission. The pace of advancement is at the discretion of the participating companies as a function of available budget and "sweat equity."