A Multi-agent System for Integrated Control and Asset Management of Petroleum Production Facilities - Part 3: Performance Analysis and System Limitations

This three-part paper thoroughly addresses the design and development of multi-agent system for asset management for the petroleum industry, which is crucial for profitable oil and gas facilities operations and maintenance. A research project was initiated to study the feasibility of an intelligent asset management system. Having proposed a conceptual model, architecture, and implementation plan for such a system in previous work (J.H. Taylor and A.F. Sayda, 2005), (A.F. Sayda and J.H. Taylor, 2006), defined its autonomy, communications, and artificial intelligence (AI) requirements and initiated the preliminary design of a simple system prototype (J.H. Taylor and A.F. Sayda, 2008), we are extending the build of a system prototype and simulate it in real-time to validate its logical behavior in normal and abnormal process situations and analyze its performance. The third-part paper addresses the ICAM system prototype validation in terms of system performance analysis and system behavior during unexpected situations.