Development of an innovative criticality index for turnaround management in an oil refinery

This research work presents the development and application of a preventive maintenance programme in an oil refinery plant. This study was carried out in a period of three years in one of the main Italian refinery. The research has been focused on the turnaround process that has been analysed by two different approaches: a risk-based method and an innovative criticality index. Both have been used as decision tools for clearly assessing the maintenance tasks and equipment to include in the process. The results have highlighted a clear improvement in terms of resources usage optimisation, outage duration, production loss and total costs reduction and increase of the interval between two shutdowns.