Application of Analytical Hierarchical Process in Equipment Maintenance Scheduling and Decision-Making Process in Oil/Gas
Chibuike Mathew Udeh
ESUT Business School, Enugu State University of Science and Technology, Enugu, Nigeria.
Martin Atu Ngozika Anikwe
ESUT Business School, Enugu State University of Science and Technology, Enugu, Nigeria and Faculty of Agriculture, Enugu State University of Science and Technology, Enugu, Nigeria.
Eliazar Elisha Audu *
Budget and Planning, NPSC HQ, Abuja. Nigeria and Centre for Information and Telecommunication Engineering, University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Operational efficiency and reliability of equipment directly impact production and revenue streams. Maintenance, an essential aspect of Oil/Gas operations, is a set of activities that aim at preserving the condition of equipment to reduce the probability of failure and increase operating life cycle of equipment. The culture of maintenance evolves considerably from run to failure and corrective to preventive maintenance practices. These set of activities are expensive and significantly affect the cost of sales and operating expenditure especially in Oil and Gas sector. With the need to optimize operating cost, use of data in prioritizing equipment maintenance becomes necessary. This paper provides a novel approach for prioritizing critical equipment maintenance activities using Analytical Hierarchical Process (AH). A family of Weibull distribution function are use to define five parameters (criteria) namely the Weibull Continuous Distribution Function (CDF), Weibull Probability Density Function, Reliability function, failure rate and equipment availability. To validate the use of AHP method, data from Nine (9) critical equipment from a pump station in Port-Harcourt, Nigeria was used to prioritize maintenance activities. The slope shape parameter values of \(\gamma\) \(\epsilon\){0.5,1,2} are considered, which affects the shape of the distribution functions. The results show that multi-criterion AHP-approach supports subjective decision making by providing quantitative weighted ranking of equipment based on priority. The result indicates that equipment with best values has lowest priority ranking.
Keywords: Analytical hierarchical process, equipment maintenance, Risk-based approach, mean-time between failure (MTBF), weibull distribution functions