| dc.description.abstract | The fluctuation of oil price, as well as the introduction of Industry 4.0 has driven the Oil and Gas (O&G) industry to venture into the unmanned installations concept aiming to reduce human involvement on the offshore installations. The reduction or elimination of offshore personnel can bring reduction to the operational costs (OPEX), improve personnel’s safety risk, and increase production efficiency. Aker Solutions (AKSO) has proposed a novel concept of designing an unmanned Floating, Production, Storage, and Offloading (FPSO) installation. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to design an optimal maintenance campaign of one maintenance campaign annually to be used for the unmanned installations of a FPSO, which is in accordance to the AKSO’s unmanned FPSO concept in regards to the maintenance scope.
Five methodology phases are designed and included in this research to fulfill the proposed research problem and objectives: (1) System and Case Analysis, (2) Maintenance Data Analysis, (3) Optimal Maintenance Scenario, (4) Modelling and Simulation, and lastly, (5) Verification and Validation. The main work in this thesis is the developing of the decision workflow, named “Optimal Maintenance Workflow” for implementing on the selected critical equipment - “Unmanning Study”. After that, the modelling and simulation applies the system dynamic approach, to simulate the timelines of different maintenance settings (preventive maintenance activities, corrective maintenance by failure modes, OREDA database) for a time of 15 years for comparison.
From the maintenance data provided from AKSO, the analyzed result shows that the separator is the critical equipment. However, it is known that the separator itself is considered as a robust equipment, while the surrounding instrumentations connected to the separator constitute a large factor that causes the separator to be considered as the critical equipment. The decision workflow developed consists of six different scenarios, which are possible solutions to either eliminate, reduce or postpone the maintenance activities. The maintenance activities for the separator have successfully been reduced or postponed after implementing the decision workflow at the elementary stage with the use of the “Unmanning Study” excel sheet. The “Unmanning Study” is a matrix that matches the maintenance tasks with suitable design or technological solutions to either ensure the maintenance frequency of at least one year or to eliminate the man hours.
To conclude, the “Unmanning Study” is an extension of the existing risk-based maintenance, which is a step further that can be performed after the manning study. This provides crucial inputs for the system developer of the unmanned installation as it provides key technical specifications. This thesis also concludes that application of autonomous solutions and predictive maintenance, and changing of loading profile are the main interventions to enable unmanned installation to secure only one yearly maintenance campaign. A few recommendations shall be considered when performing the “Unmanning Study”: (1) historical failure data shall be used if possible, and data should be visualized and analyzed to obtain several maintenance metrics, (2) simple benefit analysis and complexity level analysis should be performed to get insights of the potential gains and challenges involved, (3) identify potential interfaces and effectiveness dependencies that brings complexity to the system, (4) consider detailed technical specifications of each scenario, and lastly (5) involve relevant stakeholders in the “Unmanning Study” process.
This thesis serves as a preliminary effort for the unmanned FPSO installation concept as the Unmanning Study is not matured enough at this stage, and much efforts are still required to achieve the unmanned installation concept in the maintenance scope. Moreover, it is not limited to use only in the O&G industry, but also for the chemical manufacturing industry, which has been preliminarily verified to be also practical in the chemical manufacturing industry. | |