The Development of Reliability Analysis Toolkit (RAT) For Analyzing Plant Maintenance Data

Reliability analysis is an important tool for engineers in assessing the performance of
existing operational system of the plant. Major loss can be eliminated and therefore
increase the plant profitability. The aim of this study is to develop a toolkit that will
assist the engineers in performing the reliability analysis. The main issues found during
the research are namely improper methodology used by the engineers and inadequate of
time to perform the analysis. In order to solve these issues, a computer based toolkit
called as Reliability Analysis Toolkit (RAT) is programmed using the combination of
Microsoft Excel, Macro and Visual Basic for the interface. The toolkit (RAT) is
developed using two type of analysis which is exploratory and inferential analysis. In
exploratory analysis, the plant field maintenance data is processed into graphical charts
such as Pareto and trend chart to help the engineer in identifying the critical
equipment/systems. In Inferential analysis, the plant field maintenance data is analyzed
for independent and identically distributed data (IID) validation whether life data
analysis (LDA) may be used or not in the reliability analysis. In this step, Laplace trend
test and serial correlation test are used to test the IID assumption. The toolkit will also
provides the engineer with the reliability measures for the analysis namely MTBF and
failure rate. After the toolkit (RAT) is developed, a case study is conducted to validate
the result generated by the toolkit. The results from the toolkit are compared with the
result obtain analytically via Excel Spreadsheets. From the demonstrated results, the
toolkit shows the ability to analyze the plant field data since the results obtain are
exactly similar with analytical results. This study achieved the objective and will
expedite the analysis process so that the major plant issues can be addressed timely and
appropriately.