Turnaround management in an oil refinery

This paper aims at describing the methodologies and the techniques used to manage an oil refinery scheduled maintenance (turnaround). In particular it will be discussed a risk based approach to define the equipment to be included in the turnaround process. Oil refinery turnaround main goal is to respect the maintenance schedule in terms of times and costs as defined by the management. Owing to the heavy impact of plants shutdown for controlling and repairing oil refinery equipments both in terms of production loss and of major maintenance costs it is of vital importance to clearly assess which maintenance task have to be included in the schedule. The application of the procedure to the planned turnaround has proved that a risk-based techniques decision support system leads to an improvement in maintenance efficiency and efficacy.