All manufacturing plants are extremely complex systems that evolve through "stable domains"... hopefully from "Reactive" to "Planned" and progressively towards "Precision" and "World Class". For a plant, the "system" includes people, processes, technology and culture that must be developed simultaneously to achieve high reliability at optimum costs. At PBF's Paulsboro Refinery in New Jersey, the new science of "Complex Adaptive Systems" is being applied to the Maintenance and Reliability strategy as a "bottom- up" agent based, integrated approach to reliability improvement. This paper attempts to highlight some of the most interesting aspects of this strategy and how Paulsboro has achieved one of the highest mechanical availabilities within the US refining industry.
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