Equipment Class

A more specific classification within an equipment class that distinguishes items by their design configuration, operating principle, or application. Equipment type provides finer-grained grouping for reliability analysis and maintenance strategy. For example, within the 'Pump' equipment class, types include centrifugal single-stage, centrifugal multi-stage, reciprocating, and positive displacement.

Petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries — collection and exchange of reliability and maintenance data for equipment. This standard defines a taxonomy for equipment classification, failure mode coding, and data fields required for reliability analysis. It provides a common language for recording failure events across organizations and installations.

A physical item of plant, equipment, or infrastructure that has value to an organization and is subject to management decisions regarding its acquisition, operation, maintenance, modification, and disposal. In asset integrity management, assets include pressure vessels, piping systems, storage tanks, rotating equipment, structural components, electrical equipment, and instrumentation systems. Each asset has an identity, a defined function, and documented attributes.

The average number of failures per unit of time for a population of items, typically expressed as failures per hour, per year, or per million hours. Failure rate (lambda) is the reciprocal of MTBF for constant-failure-rate systems. It is a statistical average measure, distinct from the instantaneous hazard rate, and is most accurate when the failure rate is approximately constant (beta near 1).