Assessment of risk in the design phase of an offshore project
- Four Elements Ltd., London (United Kingdom)
- Statoil, Stavanger (Norway)
The detailed design phase of an offshore project is normally characterized by a very tight project schedule. There are several examples in the offshore industry of project delays and losses caused by inadequacies in the design phase. A methodology has been developed to assess the risk of the design phase of a project in order to reduce the probability for serious design errors. This methodology involves the assessment of the management of the project team, of the verification, and it requires the cooperation of design engineers and oil company and the atmosphere of openness in the design team. It is believed that this methodology can be developed into a powerful tool to reduce the risk of design error and better channel the verification effort in future offshore projects. The methodology for the risk assessment of the design process has been developed within the framework of Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA). The methodology is applied in two steps: the first pass assessment combines the organizational, management and personnel system analysis which yields the error potential, which is summed with the consequence criticality of a failure in the design process to give the risk profile of the process. The results can be used in the improvement of the organization and management of the design process, and for focusing attention for the second step, the detailed risk assessment, which combines an analysis of design task and opportunities for error into fault trees to estimate design failure probability. An example of the application of the methodology to the live design process is presented, and the benefits and practicalities of using it as a management tool discussed. Some of the intermediate findings of the analysis, expressed in the form of strengths and weaknesses, so that they can be used for risk reduction, are also given.
- OSTI ID:
- 455496
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-9606279--; ISBN 0-7918-1491-2
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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