New Tendencies in Maintenance in the Electric Industry

Benchmarking, mission declaration, revision of maintenance strategies and reengineering were popular activities in the ninety. Big amounts of money were invested and the results many times were not good enough, or nonexistent. Then, what should improve the maintenance/performance of our assets? In this paper we discuss about available tools, their potential benefits, weaknesses and their strengths. Other topics discussed are cost-risk-benefit evaluation of the of plant shutdowns, inspections, spares holding, equipment replacement, etc. The use of the previous techniques joined to Reliability Centered Maintenance +, and, Root Cause Analysis being part of Operational Reliability Improvement plans would drive companies to the state of the art: Asset Management. This work was done for reviewing the current state of the maintenance for power stations, trying to adapt this maintenance to the growing necessities of this industry. The findings were too much be covered in detail in this article, however it will be useful for introducing topics that every day are taking more relevance. Previous versions of this paper have already been published; however this version has been updated to include more information based in more than 6 years of the author's additional experience in the treated topics.