Predicting asset health and the root cause of failures using Smart Fault Trees
In asset-heavy industries like oil and gas, mining, energy and manufacturing critical assets are usually operated over many years and sometimes even a few decades. The risk of these critical assets operating with invisible degradation is enormous on the end-users. Moreover, many end users are forced to have a shortened preventive maintenance schedule to ensure minimum downtime and keep the plant operations running. This further elevates the risks of unforeseen failures. With the advent of Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things, technology has opened many avenues for asset-intensive industries.
This paper presents an approach developed by Infosys using advanced technologies to solve the challenging problem of proactively identifying hidden Faults in assets to help plan the maintenance better and reduce unscheduled maintenance events. The solution uses a combination of Fault Tree Analysis for Failure Mode Evaluation and Analysis (FMEA) and operational data from plant systems to determine the current state of the asset and identify reasons for issues.