ITER Framework for RAMI Engineering

The systems engineering process starts with the discovery of the real issues that need to be resolved and the identification of failures that are the most probable or/and have the highest negative impact during the life cycle of a project. Systems engineering involves finding mitigations to these most critical problems. This logic is fully followed in reliability, availability, maintainability, inspectability (RAMI) engineering. Although this area is at its beginning in fusion technologies, a few years ago the ITER Organization developed an approach to assess the RAMI requirement of systems. As an example of what a RAMI analysis can bring to the maintainability and thus operational availability of a nuclear fusion facility like ITER, the availability of the cask and plug remote handling system in charge of handling of port plugs and their moving between the port cells to the hot cell facility is addressed in the case of diagnostic equatorial port plugs.