Safety systems for the oil and gas industrial facilities: Design, maintenance policy choice, and crew scheduling

The technology of oil and gas production is associated with significant hazards. Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) are designed to ensure proper and safe operations in this sector. This research presents a framework that produces reasonable recommendations (requirements specification) for the SIS design and maintenance with consideration of the three key perspectives relevant to any petroleum engineering project, namely those of facility operators, engineering contractors, and the authorities. The contribution of this research to the area of engineering design is simultaneously addressing the decisions on the SIS design, organization of its maintenance, and employee scheduling for the remotely-located hazardous industrial facilities. These decisions are made based on the choice of maintenance policies incorporated into a Markov model of the system functioning. Another contribution of this research to the reliability modeling area is incorporating diverse redundancy into the modeling and decision-making framework. Thus, this research explores a trade-off between the capital investments into the SIS’s design complexity and the operational expenditures associated with system maintenance and expected losses due to potential hazards. The developed multi-objective decision-making framework requires a black-box optimization approach to produce results. This research is relevant to engineering departments and contractors specializing in designing technological solutions for the petroleum sector.