FRACAS: An Overview and Practices in NPCIL

A failure reporting, analysis and corrective action system (FRACAS) is a process that gives organizations a way to report, classify and analyze failures, as well as plan corrective reactions in response to those failures. It provides a disciplined and iterative method for solving reliability and maintenance issues throughout the life cycle of a system. It is an important part of a reliability programs that can be used to control or eliminate failures. Software is often used to implement a FRACAS system to help manage multiple failure reports and produce a history of failure with corresponding corrective actions, so recorded information from those past failures can be analyzed. The FRACAS report could include Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), Mean Time Between Repair (MTTR), dominant failure patterns in operation, common threads between failures etc. FRACAS has been surveyed as the most important reliability task that can be performed on a program. This paper addresses a FRACAS system in general and as employed by NPCIL in various power plant across India. Emphasis is placed on data collection, evaluation, and root cause analysis. This paper also shows a philosophy and strategy that can be used to create an effective FRACAS system (which will consist of more than just a failure and corrective action database) in an Indian nuclear power plant working environment.