Criticality Analysis for Maintenance Purposes of Platform Supply Vessels in Remote Areas

Abstract

The oil and gas industry is pushing toward new unexplored remote areas, potentially rich in resources but with limited industry presence, infrastructure, and emergency preparedness. Maintenance support is very important and challenging in such remote areas. A platform supply vessel (PSV) is an essential part of maintenance support. Hence, the acceptable level of its availability performance is high. Identification of critical components of the PSV provides essential information for optimizing maintenance management, defining a spare parts strategy, estimating competence needs for PSV operation, and achieving the acceptable level of availability performance. Currently, there are no standards or guidelines for the criticality analysis of PSVs for maintenance purposes. In this paper, a methodology for the identification of the critical components of PSVs has been developed, based on the available standard. It is a systematic screening process. The method considers functional redundancy and the consequences of loss of function as criticality criteria at the main and subfunction levels. Furthermore, at the component level, risk tools such as failure modes, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA), and fault tree analysis (FTA) will be applied in order to identify the most critical components. Moreover, the application of the proposed approach will be illustrated by a real case study.