ENHANCING MAINTENANCE EFFECTIVENESS USING EXPERT SYSTEM TECHNOLOGY

Maintenance activities are major cost indicator of any industrial operation. Among many cost factors being involved the cost due to endangering safety is an important one. To reduce the adverse impacts of maintenance activities in NPPs, efforts are focused to improve the effectiveness of maintenance by US-NRC. The US-NRC published its Maintenance Rule to outline a set of requirements by which more attention are put on those systems, components, and structures performance are critical on safe operation of plant. The Rule is divide in two sections one describing the requirements and the other its scope. To facilitate the implementation f the Rule, a software-based expert system, MEMORES, is developed to take all contributing elements, including data, causal relations and the a number of analytical safety assessment methods and tools. The Rule and the implementing application are described in details in this paper.