If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Inspection and maintenance of plant and machinery has traditionally been based on prescriptive industry practices. However, increased experience and a greater understanding of operational hazards is leading sections of industry to take a more informed approach to planning inspection and maintenance, targeting resources to reduce the risk to as low as reasonably practicable. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to asset management to minimize risks in the most cost effective way. Design/methodology/approach -The approach shown optimizes run-repair-replace decisionmaking in the integrity management of assets with the ultimate aim of maximising the impact of money spent on risk mitigation actions. The risk-based approach, as opposed to the more conventional approaches, assesses failure in its wider context by considering not just the likelihood of failure, but also the consequences should the failure event occur. Findings -The risk-based methodology presents a cost-effective way to minimise life cycle costs in the management of assets whilst maintaining reliability or availability targets, and operating within safety and environmental regulation. Practical implications -In this paper, for demonstration, a wind turbine system consisting of a number of components including structural components is used. However, the methodology can be extended to any system in which components can be analyzed to provide the required inputs to the risk model. Originality/value -At a time when competitive pressures force asset managers to prioritize their maintenance, the risk-based methodology presented here is a rational, efficient and somewhat flexible way to asset integrity management.

Despite an increasing demand for considering sustainability aspects in asset management, there is a lack of guidance for decision-makers on how this can be achieved. The aim of this research is to present rational decision support for sustainable management of industrial assets in situations where there are multiple conflicting objectives. For this purpose, a Multi-criteria decision analysis framework that incorporates sustainability criteria over the whole life cycle has been developed. Stakeholder participation and uncertainty assessment are considered explicitly allowing for a holistic perspective and higher confidence in the results. In order to facilitate communication, methods for visualization of numerical results are highlighted. While the focus of this study is on the development of the framework, the challenges of applying it and potential steps to address these are discussed through an application in the shipping sector

Corrosion is often the cause of pipeline failure potentially resulting in disasters causing damage and fatalities. To maintain the integrity of nonpiggable lines, NACE's external corrosion direct assessment (ECDA) methodology is commonly applied to assess external corrosion that can occur at coating defects on underground pipelines. Work presented here is from a validation exercise carried out on the results of ECDA assessment using subsequent excavation data. The ECDA was carried out over 300 km of crude oil pipelines with excavation carried out at 200 locations. This paper models the relationships between pipeline coating defect area (area with coating breakdown), corrosion depth, direct current-voltage gradient (DCVG) measurements (in terms of %IR values) and factors capturing diverse environmental conditions through novel application of regression models. This paper sheds light on the challenges in drawing conclusions in the assessment of corrosion from DCVG inspection data and other types of data that form key inputs to ECDA. We expect that the analyses shown here using innovative regression models will support more reliable predictions of external corrosion in pipelines.

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Attempts to formalize inspection and monitoring strategies in industry have struggled to combine evidence from multiple sources (including subject matter expertise) in a mathematically coherent way. The perceived requirement for large amounts of data are often cited as the reason that quantitative risk-based inspection is incompatible with the sparse and imperfect information that is typically available to structural integrity engineers. Current industrial guidance is also limited in its methods of distinguishing quality of inspections, as this is typically based on simplified (qualitative) heuristics. In this paper, Bayesian multi-level (partial pooling) models are proposed as a flexible and transparent method of combining imperfect and incomplete information, to support decision-making regarding the integrity management of in-service structures. This work builds on the established theoretical framework for computing the expected value of information, by allowing for partial pooling between inspection measurements (or groups of measurements). This method is demonstrated for a simulated example of a structure with active corrosion in multiple locations, which acknowledges that the data will be associated with some precision, bias, and reliability. Quantifying the extent to which an inspection of one location can reduce uncertainty in damage models at remote locations has been shown to influence many aspects of the expected value of an inspection. These results are considered in the context of the current challenges in risk based structural integrity management.