Electric power plants are strong assets in an increasingly competitive industry. That is why EDF must pay great attention to improving the availability, safety and the efficiency of its infrastructures. Indeed, equipment failures may have significant effects on safety, environment, loss generation, life cycle costs and also public opinion. Therefore, the maintenance process, which allows us to keep facilities in operation, must be effective. In order to meet this challenge, one must be able to detect any reliability trends potentially due to an unexpected aging phenomenon, and quantify the effects of maintenance on reliability to assess its relevancy. This can be done by different suitable and robust statistical methods and tools that will be presented and illustrated with industrial case studies.

Key Words: Reliability Analysis, Maintenance, Equipment Performance, Trend Detection, Aging, Statistical Tools

Emmanuel Remy and Veronique Verrier
EDF R&D
France