Information management between maintenance and production departments during a scheduled outage in a nuclear power plant

Maintenance operations have for a long time been identified as critical situations where safety is concerned. This results not only from the characteristics of these operations but also from their organizational context. On the other hand, important changes in maintenance organization have to be emphasized. More specifically, task sharing between production and maintenance is often modified. For these reasons, interactions between the operators, the organization of the two departments and related reliability and safety problems have been studied.
This report presents analyses of the follow-up activities, carried out by maintenance and process control operators, during a scheduled outage in a nuclear power plant. The description of information flow related to maintenance operations through four stages of this follow-up highlights the non exhaustive nature of information. Moreover, the information is distributed (and not shared) both between those involved and the four stages of follow-up. The main explanatory factors, the regulations of the workgroups and the effect of the prescribed procedure on information management are discussed. Some perspectives of analyses are given and some proposals made to the firm are described.