Availability estimation and management for complex processing systems

“Availability” is the terminology used in asset intensive industries such as petrochemical and hydrocarbons processing to describe the readiness of equipment, systems or plants to perform their designed functions. It is a measure to suggest a facility’s capability of meeting targeted production in a safe working environment. Availability is also vital as it encompasses reliability and maintainability, allowing engineers to manage and operate facilities by focusing on one performance indicator. These benefits make availability a very demanding and highly desired area of interest and research for both industry and academia. In this dissertation, new models, approaches and algorithms have been explored to estimate and manage the availability of complex hydrocarbon processing systems. The risk of equipment failure and its effect on availability is vital in the hydrocarbon industry, and is also explored in this research. The importance of availability encouraged companies to invest in this domain by putting efforts and resources to develop novel techniques for system availability enhancement. Most of the work in this area is focused on individual equipment compared to facility or system level availability assessment and management. This research is focused on developing an new systematic methods to estimate system availability. The main focus areas in this research are to address availability estimation and management through physical asset management, risk-based availability estimation strategies, availability and safety using a failure assessment framework, and availability enhancement using early equipment fault detection and maintenance scheduling optimization.

Electronic Technology in NL Schools: An Environmental Scan, 2015-16

This study was designed to obtain information on the prevalence of electronic technology—in terms of availability and use—in classrooms in Newfoundland and Labrador. An online survey was developed and delivered electronically to a randomly chosen sample of 800 k-12 educators in Newfoundland & Labrador’s English School District during Winter, 2016. In total, 377 surveys were completed. Among other things, the findings showed that SMART Boards and iPads were receiving significant usage while the usage of computer labs and of various social media tools was not particularly high.