Configuration management (CM) is a systems engineering process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. The CM process is widely used by military engineering organizations to manage changes throughout the system lifecycle of complex systems, such as weapon systems, military vehicles, and information systems. Outside the military, the CM process is also used with IT service management as defined by ITIL, and with other domain models in the civil engineering and other industrial engineering segments such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, and buildings.
The technical meaning of maintenance involves functional checks, servicing, repairing or replacing of necessary devices, equipment, machinery, building infrastructure, and supporting utilities in industrial, business, and residential installations. Over time, this has come to include multiple wordings that describe various cost-effective practices to keep equipment operational; these activities occur either before or after a failure.
An inspection is, most generally, an organized examination or formal evaluation exercise. In engineering activities inspection involves the measurements, tests, and gauges applied to certain characteristics in regard to an object or activity. The results are usually compared to specified requirements and standards for determining whether the item or activity is in line with these targets, often with a Standard Inspection Procedure in place to ensure consistent checking. Inspections are usually non-destructive.
Reliability engineering is a sub-discipline of systems engineering that emphasizes the ability of equipment to function without failure. Reliability describes the ability of a system or component to function under stated conditions for a specified period of time. Reliability is closely related to availability, which is typically described as the ability of a component or system to function at a specified moment or interval of time.
Integrated logistic support (ILS) is a technology in the system engineering to lower a product life cycle cost and decrease demand for logistics by the maintenance system optimization to ease the product support. Although originally developed for military purposes, it is also widely used in commercial customer service organisations.
IEC standard 61511 is a technical standard which sets out practices in the engineering of systems that ensure the safety of an industrial process through the use of instrumentation. Such systems are referred to as Safety Instrumented Systems. The title of the standard is "Functional safety - Safety instrumented systems for the process industry sector".
Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a concept of maintenance planning to ensure that systems continue to do what their user require in their present operating context. Successful implementation of RCM will lead to increase in cost effectiveness, reliability, machine uptime, and a greater understanding of the level of risk that the organization is managing.
Risk-based inspection (RBI) is an optimal maintenance business process used to examine equipment such as pressure vessels, quick-opening closure - doors, heat exchangers, and piping in industrial plants. RBI is a decision-making methodology for optimizing inspection plans. The RBI concept lies in that the risk of failure can be assessed in relation to a level that is acceptable, and inspection and repair used to ensure that the level of risk is below that acceptance limit. It examines the health, safety and environment and business risk of ‘active’ and ‘potential’ damage mechanisms to assess and rank failure probability and consequence. This ranking is used to optimize inspection intervals based on site-acceptable risk levels and operating limits, while mitigating risks as appropriate. RBI analysis can be qualitative, quantitative or semi-quantitative in nature.
Security controls are safeguards or countermeasures to avoid, detect, counteract, or minimize security risks to physical property, information, computer systems, or other assets. In the field of information security, such controls protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information.
Information security management (ISM) defines and manages controls that an organization needs to implement to ensure that it is sensibly protecting the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of assets from threats and vulnerabilities. The core of ISM includes information risk management, a process that involves the assessment of the risks an organization must deal with in the management and protection of assets, as well as the dissemination of the risks to all appropriate stakeholders. This requires proper asset identification and valuation steps, including evaluating the value of confidentiality, integrity, availability, and replacement of assets. As part of information security management, an organization may implement an information security management system and other best practices found in the ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27002, and ISO/IEC 27035 standards on information security.
Process safety is an interdisciplinary engineering domain focusing on the study, prevention, and management of large-scale fires, explosions and chemical accidents in process plants or other facilities dealing with hazardous materials, such as refineries and oil and gas production installations. Thus, process safety is generally concerned with the prevention of, control of, mitigation of and recovery from unintentional hazardous materials releases that can have a serious effect to people, plant and/or the environment.
Medical equipment management is a term for the professionals who manage operations, analyze and improve utilization and safety, and support servicing healthcare technology. These healthcare technology managers are, much like other healthcare professionals referred to by various specialty or organizational hierarchy names.
An Integrity Engineering Audit is carried out within an Integrity engineering function so as to ensure compliance with international, national and company specific standards and regulations.
Integrity Management Plan is a documented and systematic approach to ensure the long-term integrity of an asset or assets.
Asset Integrity Management Systems (AIMS) outline the ability of an asset to perform its required function effectively and efficiently whilst protecting health, safety and the environment and the means of ensuring that the people, systems, processes, and resources that deliver integrity are in place, in use and will perform when required over the whole life-cycle of the asset. The technical aspects of AIMS are illustrated in Figure 1. Originally developed in the UK, Asset Integrity Management was the result of a collaboration between the HSE and leading oil and gas operators resulting in a series of reports and workshops, the outcome being a group of documents called Key Programmes, currently publicly available.
Infrastructure asset management is the integrated, multidisciplinary set of strategies in sustaining public infrastructure assets such as water treatment facilities, sewer lines, roads, utility grids, bridges, and railways. Generally, the process focuses on the later stages of a facility's life cycle, specifically maintenance, rehabilitation, and replacement. Asset management specifically uses software tools to organize and implement these strategies with the fundamental goal to preserve and extend the service life of long-term infrastructure assets which are vital underlying components in maintaining the quality of life in society and efficiency in the economy. In the 21st century, climate change adaptation has become an important part of infrastructure asset management competence.
IT risk management is the application of risk management methods to information technology in order to manage IT risk, i.e.:
Piping corrosion circuit or Corrosion loop / Piping Circuitization and Corrosion Modelling, is carried out as part of either a Risk Based Inspection analysis (RBI) or Materials Operating Envelope analysis (MOE). It is the systematization of the piping components versus failure modes analysis into materials operating envelope. It groups piping materials / chemical make-up into systems / sub systems and assigns corrosion mechanisms. These are then monitored over the operating lifetime of the facility. This analysis is performed on circuit inspection results to determine and optimize circuit corrosion rates and measured thickness/dates for circuit components. Corrosion Circuits are utilized in the Integrity Management Plan (IMP) which forms a part of the overall Asset integrity management system and is an integral part of any RBI analysis. Many times a "system" will be a broad overview of the facilities process flow, broken by stream constituents, while a circuit level analysis breaks systems into smaller "circuits" that group common metallurgies, equal temperatures and pressures, and expected damage mechanisms.
Corrosion loop(s) are systematized analysis "loops" used during Risk-based inspection analysis. Both terms “RBI Corrosion loops” or “RBI corrosion circuits” are generic terms used to indicate the systematization of piping systems into usable and understandable parts associated with corrosion. Systematized piping loops or circuits are systems used in Risk Based Inspection analysis to assess the likelihood and consequence of failure. Other systematization may also prove useful, such as, i.e. inspection, consequence, materials of construction and chemistry. The system (or sub systems) maybe used to identify, pressure / temperature, subsequent failure mechanism and possible failure rate. They may be based upon Construction drawings, Process Flow diagrams or Piping & Instrument diagrams as required. Each loop or circuit maybe identified using a unique code, with description about; process, material & degradation mode, material, cladding, C.A, specs. See system model comes under the general heading of system analysis the terms analysis and synthesis come from Greek where they mean respectively "to take apart" and "to put together". See also systems theory: Note the exact definition of the systematized risk analysis " loop" is left to the reader and their requirements of the system analysis required, however to ensure consistency and that the expected results is produced, this should be defined before they are constructed. It is suggested that a “true” corrosion loop should be a grouping were the degradation mechanism is "likely" to be the same i.e.
Robotic non-destructive testing (NDT) is a method of inspection used to assess the structural integrity of petroleum, natural gas, and water installations. Crawler-based robotic tools are commonly used for in-line inspection (ILI) applications in pipelines that cannot be inspected using traditional intelligent pigging tools.
