Evaluation of the production availability of an offshore installation by stochastic Petri nets modeling

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the combination of stochastic Petri nets and Monte Carlo simulation approach for the evaluation of the production availability of a multi-state, multi-output offshore installation with operational loops. The presented test case comprises a great number of the problems encountered when dealing with probabilistic studies related to production processes. The reason for using of Petri net modeling is that it provides the necessary flexibility to describe the complexity of the plant and the realistic aspects of system behavior, such as a degradation of components, standby of components, corrective and preventive maintenance with stochastic or deterministic durations, a limited number of repair teams and associated component repair priorities, which determine the system stochastic evolution and which are not easily captured by analytical models. Different production levels of the multi-state system are assessed and evaluated from both reliability and production efficiency point of view. Four selected configurations of the system are computed and discussed in detail to investigate how the production efficiency and average availability are influenced by applying of a preventive maintenance and an additional cold standby of component.