Abstract: Equipment management in Chinese petrochemical process industry basically belongs to the traditional breakdown maintenance pattern, and the basic inspection/maintenance decision-making is subjective and qualitative. Equipment inspection/maintenance tasks are mainly based on the empirical or qualitative method, and it lacks identification and classification of critical equipment, so that maintenance resources cant be reasonably allocated. Reliability, availability and safety of equipment are difficult to control and guarantee due to the existing maintenance deficiencies, maintenance surplus, potential danger and possible accidents. In order to ensure stable production and reduce operation cost, intelligent maintenance decision-making system(IMD) is established, which integrates enterprise resource planning(ERP), manufacturing executive system(MES), risk-based inspection(RBI), reliability-centered maintenance(RCM), safety integrity level(SIL), predictive maintenance information systems (PMIS), distributed control system(DCS) and other process data together. IMD can provide dynamic risk rank data, predictive maintenance data and equipment operation performance indicator decision-making data, through which the personnel at all levels can grasp the risk state of equipment timely and accurately and optimize maintenance schedules to support the decision-making. The result of an engineering case shows that the system can improve reliability, availability, and safety, lower failure frequency, decrease failure consequences and make full use of maintenance resources, thus achieving the reasonable and positive result. Experiences show that the key factors affecting the successful transition to an IMD informed approach include firm support from both the manager and the engineers as well as education and training for engineers, operators and maintenance staffs.

Key words: Availability, Integrity management, Maintainability, Predictive maintenance, Process industry, Reliability