Think of a number… by Tony McGrail: Peek into the Transformers Magazine Special Edition on Digitalization!
This article presents asset health index (AHI).
Image for illustration purposes
This article presents asset health index (AHI) as a means to summarise disparate data into a single value to address a specific question: Does the asset need maintenance, for example, and if so, when? This short discussion will not go into the details of generating an AHI but will focus on what happens next.
An AHI helps to estimate the condition of the asset of transformers. Looking at the AHI value, the end-user can get a feeling that they know all they need to know, which sometimes can be misleading. So, the big question is: does everyone understand what the AHI really means? Have we lost the technical information used to derive an AHI?
AHIs are commonly used to rank assets for prioritisation of maintenance, replacement, or other intervention. There is a lot of work that goes on to reduce all relevant and available data to an AHI which covers the 4 key aspects of an AHI (2):
- Calibration, so that the timescales for action of similar indices are common
- Monotonicity, so that worse indices are always associated with a more urgent timescale
- Auditable, so we can see which data was important in a specific index being generated
- Justifiable, so that if we have to spend money, we have a good reason as to why ̶ we can see the failure modes identified and what they imply
Keywords: asset health index, meaning, understanding, knowledge
Basically, the AHI summarises asset, condition, and operational data. How can it be used in financial and operational planning? Click here to gain a better picture.
The next article will be out soon, so stay tuned to be the first one to read it!