57th ESReDA Seminar on Advances in Reliability, Risk and Safety Analysis with Big Data (23-24 October 2019, Valencia, Spain)
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The 57th ESReDA seminar was held on 23rd‐24th October 2019, hosted by the Technical University of Valencia and supported by the research and educational center C-Motores Termicos. There were eight paper presentations and three keynote speeches by Prof. Olga Fink (ETH Zurich), Prof. Sebastián Martorell (U. Poliètcnica de València) and Prof. Marco Riani (U. de Parma). Also, in a round table, it was discussed by Henk Wells and Mohammad Raza the problems dealing with the application of digital concepts to Risk Based Inspections.

In general, the presentations were of very high quality and dealt with the problems related with the application of Artificial Intelligence to Safety, Reliability and Data Analysis. The proceedings of the Seminar will be published as soon as possible on the ESReDA web site.

The Seminar had the support of the local host, Prof, Bernardo Tormos, that made possible to organize it in the very nice city of València, Spain. Also, it was possible to have a technical visit to the Laboratories for research and development of the C-Motores Termicos research center.

On the 22nd October the PG on Resilience Engineering and Modelling of Networked Infrastructure, chaired by Rasa Remenytė-Prescott (U. of Nottingham), held a meeting for the follow up of their ongoing work.

During the Seminar it was announced that the PG on Reliability, Risk and Safety Analysis with Big Data will be chaired by Siegfried Eisinger (email). Those interested in participating in this PG must contact him.

The last part of the day 1 of the seminar on 23rd October had a panel session on a very interesting topic “Risk based inspection using big data analytics—Do we have a clear path way?”. This was chaired by Luis Ferreira and the panellist was Henk Wels, retired expert from DEKRA and DNV GL and author of his latest book “Failures and Forced Unavailability of Power Plants” and Mohammad Raza, Safety and Reliability expert from GE and member of the board of Directors of ESReDA.

The discussion was around the focus areas of how big data analytics development could influence the routine inspection methodologies in industries both in positive and negative way.  The robustness of the predictive analytics will influence the conditional monitoring methods positively to a more accurate way to determine the lifetime consumption, hence optimising the useful life. But at the same time physics behind certain parameters like wear are still lagging in terms of understanding and this will take immense effort to come to a state that it can be fully predicted.

Luis Ferreira was sharing his experience on application of risk-based inspections in Oil and gas industry while Henk presented few learnings from his power plants assessments in the past. As Mohammad Raza has been keenly working on analytics development, deployment and converting the data into outcome-based guarantees, He presented how the industry is embracing the change and how disruptive technocrats are coming out with unique solutions with a fast track implementation time frame.  His prediction on the job market dynamics due to IIOT in the coming years and the great divide the world will see in the future, with legal norms lacking was appreciated by the audience with some surprising facts sheets.

The field examples shared during the discussion was interesting for the audience which comprised of experts and few young master’s students from the University attending this session. The interactive session with the audience was fruitful for one and all.

On the 23rd evening, on the Gala Dinner it was possible to network in a very nice and informal way, in a very good restaurant down town València. Some more pictures are available in the Gallery section.