Failure forecasting

Forecasting failure & asset profiling

Peter and four colleagues at Yorkshire Water introduced the use of Weibull formulae into capital maintenance planning and developed an industry leading approach for the expert elicitation of information that supports decision making processes where data is limited.

The purpose was to forecast asset death and the need for replacement assets for inclusion in the capital maintenance plan to support the company’s five year Strategic Business Plan.

Today, the Weibull methodology is a fundamental part of most UK water companies capital asset replacement programmes and today Peter and his associates are still developing improvements to the process to improve the accuracy of forecasting and hence the targeting of future investment needs.

Problem definition

· To develop an asset plan to ensure no interruption to service delivered

· To ensure you have the right asset, procured and operated at the right value, in the right place, at the right time, to deliver the right level of service demanded by customer and getting it right first time and every time

· Poor quality or no data to base decisions

· Having thousands of assets to include in the programme

· Inconsistency of human decisions and their inability to compute sufficient data in the time allowed

Weibull can

· give a forecast of asset death or survival

· give consistent decisions

· be extrapolated into the future

· assess the probability of failure for use in risk based decision systems