Data driven approach to risk management and decision support for dynamic positioning systems

Offshore oil and gas operations are inherently associated with risk and may have catastrophic consequences to life, property, and environment. Risk management is thus performed during the design, planning, and operation phases to control risk. Operational risk models are only periodically updated and do not always reflect the available real-time data. This is also the case for dynamic positioning (DP) operation. Monitoring the risk levels of the system during the operational phase could reduce the accident risk by providing additional decision support information for operators. In this paper, a framework for the risk management of DP operation is proposed to assist operators in decision-making. The risk management output will provide operators a real time risk status and pre-warnings of possible deviations in the system. This framework is developed to support the decision-making process of the operators with providing failure probability of alternative decision scenarios, and it can be applied to any other engineering system and operation. In order to validate the effectiveness of the framework, DP drilling operations are considered as a case study. The results demonstrate the value and effectiveness of the framework, which reduces the risk level of operations by contributing to the risk-informed decision-making of operators.