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RAMS is an acronym for Reliability, Availability, Maintenance, and Safety. The RAMS group develops new knowledge to help society and companies avoid accidents and failures, reduce losses and optimize production.
Strategy

The RAMS group focuses on three areas:

  • Reliability assessment of safety barrier systems - especially safety-instrumented systems such as emergency shutdown systems, fire and gas systems, and automatic train control.
  • New methods for risk analysis - with emphasis on modeling socio-technical systems in risk analyses in the operational phase, where results are used in operational decision-making.
  • Risk-based maintenance planning - developing methods and plans to prevent accidents caused by lack of, or erroneously performed maintenance.
Research challenges

Examples of research challenges being addressed by the RAMS group are:

  • We often say that "this was an accident waiting to happen" after large accidents, so why can we not learn more from accident investigations to be able to predict and avoid the next one?
  • Safety relies on more and more complex systems with embedded software. How can we design to make them function when we need them, and not give false alarms or cause other negative effects?
  • The competition and the demand for speed increase every day. How can we push the boundaries and still operate safely and reliably?
  • Our society is increasingly relying on complex infrastructures. How can we design these systems to be reliable and less vulnerable?
Applications

The methods and knowledge are generic, but the main applications are complex systems where consequences of failures are large, in terms of loss of life, large costs or large disruptions to society. Important application areas are the oil and gas industry, transport and critical infrastructure.

Cooperation

The RAMS group cooperates closely with other research groups at NTNU and SINTEF through the ROSS Gemini Center, www.ntnu.edu/ross. ROSS has 70--80 researchers and is one of the largest research groups in this field in the world.

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