Risk Assessment tools for categorisation of failure modes of Marine Diesel Engine: A comparative study

Abstract

Risk assessment is a vital element of most maintenance system, this is because safeguarding of equipment item requires maintenance strategies which usually depend on the degree of risk of the equipment item. In this paper two risk assessment tools; Risk Priority Number (RPN) based approach and Risk Matrix (RM) based approach, are presented for categorisation of risk of failure modes of marine diesel engine. The techniques are used to categorise failure modes into three risk levels; low, medium and high in turn and based on the risk level, maintenance strategy are assigned to each failure modes. Furthermore, the two techniques are compared and the result of the analysis revealed that, the extent of Risk matrix method similarity to the RPN approach depends on the benchmark for setting the risk level limit in the RPN method. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.