Risk Based Maintenance

Risk based maintenance prioritizes maintenance activities based on environmental, safety, and operational risk to prevent high consequence failures. This may include, among others, risk assessments to identify critical assets, priority maintenance for fuel storage, hazardous materials systems, and drainage infrastructure, climate vulnerability assessments for coastal structures, targeted inspection after extreme weather events, and integration with enterprise risk management systems.

For DMC ports, risk based maintenance can reduce the likelihood of major environmental incidents, improve resilience to climate impacts and sea level rise, protect critical infrastructure and ecosystems, align maintenance with regulatory obligations, and optimize use of limited resources.

Risk based maintenance is a systematic approach to determining maintenance priorities and intervals based on the likelihood and consequence of asset failures. Unlike time based preventive maintenance (which applies standard intervals to all equipment), risk based maintenance concentrates resources on assets where failure would cause the greatest environmental, safety, operational, or financial consequences.

The approach typically involves, among others:

• Identification of critical assets through risk assessment (considering consequences of failure, likelihood of failure, and asset criticality for operations);
• Classification of assets into risk categories (such as critical, important, routine);
• Definition of inspection and maintenance frequencies appropriate to each category; and
• Allocation of specialist resources and expertise to higher risk assets.

Integration with enterprise risk management (ERM) frameworks helps to ensure consistency across management domains.

For ports, assets warranting heightened maintenance attention typically include, among others, fuel storage tanks and piping systems (where failure may cause significant environmental damage), hazardous materials handling systems, stormwater and drainage infrastructure, quay walls and marine structures (particularly in tidal zones), electrical infrastructure critical to terminal operations, and emergency response equipment. DNV, as an international classification society, provides risk based inspection methodology for offshore pressure systems (DNV, 2021).

Climate related risks are increasingly incorporated into port risk based maintenance. Sea level rise, increased storm intensity, and extreme rainfall can accelerate degradation of coastal structures, overwhelm drainage systems, and damage equipment not previously considered at risk. Targeted inspection following extreme weather events is good practice, with ports verifying structural integrity and drainage capacity after cyclones, storm surges, or unusually intense rainfall.

For DMC ports, risk based maintenance is particularly relevant given climate exposure, diverse regulatory environments, and limited maintenance budgets. Some ports in the region already run certified safety, health and environmental management systems. For example, Laem Chabang Port in Thailand received PEMSEA recognition for its Port Safety, Health and Environmental Management System in 2009 (Apai and Thammapredee, 2014). Such a system does not in itself show risk based maintenance, but it can provide a management framework into which risk based maintenance is built.