Developing a FMEA Methodology to Assess Non-Technical Risks in Power Plants

Abstract

Risk Management is one of the most relevant approaches and systematic application of strategies, procedures and practices management that have been introduced in literature to identifying and analysing risks which exist through the whole life of a product or a process. As a quality management tool, the novelty of this paper suggests a modified Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA) for understanding the non-technical risk comprehensively, and to attain a systemic methodology by decomposing the risk for nine risk categories including an appropriate 84 Risk Indicators (RI's) within all those categories through the Life Cycle (LC) stages of power plants. These risk categories have been identified as: economic risks, environmental and safety health risks, social risks, technological risks, customer/demand risks, supply chain risks, internal and operational business process risks, human resources risks and management risks. These indicators are collected from literatures. The enhanced FMEA has combined the exponential and the weighted geometric mean (WGM) to calculate the Exponential Weighted Geometric Mean-RPN (EWGM-RPN). The EWGM-RPN can be used to evaluate the risk level, after which the high-risk areas can be determined. Subsequently, effective actions either preventive or corrective can be taken in time to reduce the risk to an acceptable level. However, in this paper the FMEA will not adapt an action plan. Due to that, all RPN's will be considered depending on the point scale (1 to 5) afterward, the results will be combined and extended later with AHP. This developed methodology is able to boost effective decision- making about risks, improve the awareness towards the risk management at power plants, and assist the top management to have an acceptable and preferable understanding of the organisation than lower level managers do who are close to the day-to-day (tactical plan). Additionally, this will support the organisation to develop strategic plans which are for long term. And the essential part of applying this methodology is the economic benefit. Also, this paper includes developed sustainability perspective indicators with a new fourth pillar, which is the technological dimension. The results of the analysis show that the potential strategic makers should pay special attention to the environmental and internal and operational business process risks. The developed methodology will be applied and validated for different power plants in the Middle East. An expanded validation is required to completely prove drawbacks and benefits after completing the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) model.