Reliability Event

A closed-loop process for systematically reporting failures, analyzing their root causes, implementing corrective actions, and verifying that those actions effectively prevent recurrence. FRACAS captures failure data, triggers investigation based on severity, tracks corrective action implementation, and feeds lessons learned back into the design, maintenance, and operating procedures.

A systematic investigation methodology used to identify the fundamental underlying cause(s) of a failure, incident, or undesired outcome. RCA goes beyond the immediate or proximate cause to uncover the latent organizational, procedural, or design factors that created the conditions for the event. Common RCA techniques include 5-Why analysis, fishbone (Ishikawa) diagrams, fault tree analysis, and barrier analysis.

The average time between consecutive failures of a repairable system or component, calculated as the total operating time divided by the number of failures during that period. MTBF is the primary reliability metric for repairable systems and represents the expected time of continuous operation between failure events. Higher MTBF indicates better reliability.

The specific manner in which a component, subsystem, or system fails to perform its intended function or performs it in an unintended way. A failure mode describes the observable manifestation of a failure — what goes wrong — rather than why it goes wrong (failure cause) or what happens as a result (failure effect). Each functional failure may have multiple failure modes.

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.