Assessment of the availability of an offshore installation by Monte Carlo simulation

The need of realistic models to evaluate the availability of multi-state, multi-output plants is felt in many advanced industries such as the nuclear, aerospace, oil and chemical ones. Indeed, often the complexity of the plant and of its maintenance and reconfiguration policies is such to render unfeasible its reliability/availibility evaluation by analytical models. In this paper we consider the problem of determining the production availability of an offshore installation in which three different kinds of production processes are carried out, under realistic operation and maintenance conditions, which create operational loops in the system. A new systematic procedure for following, in a computationally convenient way, the time evolution of the multi-output plant production is proposed. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.