Technical integrity management : measuring HSE awareness using AHP in selecting a maintenance strategy

Abstract

Global competition, varying oil and gas prices, ever more stringent environmental requirements, as well as increasing energy demands have caused changes in management approaches, product and process technologies, stakeholder expectations as well as competitive behavior in the oil and gas industry. At the same time, existing production facilities are aging and it is becoming more difficult to maintain the technical integrity of the physical assets which is the basis for energy production. Reductions in the plant technical integrity due to increasing failure rates strongly influence the health, safety and environmental risks and the ability of the plant to meet the production targets. To meet these challenges and to reduce costs as well as health, safety and environmental (HSE) risks, the companies need to establish relevant and achievable technical integrity goals and to optimize plant maintenance and operations processes and activities. However, it is observed that there is a general lack of synergy between technical integrity management, and HSE and quality improvement strategies. Even though the employees and their managers are doing their best to make sure that things are done right, they are often not able to implement top level performance goals in their maintenance and technical integrity strategies Normally, the companies lack good measurement approaches to assess not only weaknesses in goal awareness among the personnel responsible for technical integrity but also the degree to which high level goals are implemented in the maintenance strategies. In this paper a model based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is proposed for measuring HSE and economic awareness in maintenance and technical integrity related decision-making processes. A study is conducted for selecting an optimum maintenance strategy based on the requirements of operations on oil and gas offshore installations on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (NCS). The proposed AHP model provides an effective means to 1) determine the priorities among decision criteria and benefits and 2) assess the extent of HSE adoption in technical integrity related decision making.