Collaborative Management of Inspection Results in Power Plant Turbines

This chapter presents an industrial case study that investigates a collaborative tool for use in the fossil and nuclear power plant industries. The tool makes the results of technical inspections on fossil and nuclear power plants available to all stakeholders and assists in the post-inspection decision-making process by highlighting decisions that minimise the outage duration and prolong the turbine’s service life. Before development commenced, an actor-product-service (APS) model was employed to establish the problem, the process of which is presented in this chapter. This model describes the relationships between the elements that the system must store and manage. In this particular industrial case, the APS model defines the product as the power plant turbine and the service as technical inspections. Henceforth, this model describes the relation between the inspection tasks and results and the turbine parts that are inspected. In addition, the APS model allows the application to work jointly with the product and the service, representing the information in a way closer to the mental model of each user profile, which should result in an improvement in productivity.