F4 - Increased use of automation to reduce risk in installation and operation (O&M)
F - Operations, Management, Maintenance and Safety
Challenges/Opportunities
Human activity is a governing hazard in the offshore environment, need for reduced human risk exposure in offshore operations.
Solution
Increased use of automation to reduce human risk exposure in ORE installation and in operation and maintenance (O&M).
Context and Need
The increased number and maintenance needs for offshore assets, makes human interventions one of the main hazards in the ORE sector and should be avoided where possible/feasible.
Offshore assets are facing a difficult reliability vs. lifecycle cost challenge. Increasing system reliabilities by increasing component redundancies will increase cost, but may overall reduce the lifecycle cost of the asset, by overcompensating the initially higher CAPEX through reduced production losses and lower O&M cost.
The targeted use of automation has the potential to reduce human risk exposure. This will require dedicated testing and implementation efforts of automation solutions.
Summary
In order to reduce the risk to human life in servicing O&M requirements of ORE structures, redundant systems to reduce time off for maintenance and human intervention may be considered. This may be achieved through increasing system reliabilities by increasing component redundancies, however this is a design trade-off with cost. Evaluating and specifying the ideal trade-off point between system reliability and lifecycle cost is needed, as well as better understanding of O&M uncertainties and the adoption of risk-based approaches to minimise risk in ORE O&M.
Impact Potential
- The main impact is to reduce human hazard exposure in the offshore environment, this will also lead to reduction in CAPEX and OPEX in ORE.
- A balanced and measured increase of reliability has the potential to reduce OPEX cost through decreased production losses and reduced human interventions.
- If O&M uncertainties can be reduced the overall OPEX cost and production losses can be reduced.
Research Status
Automation of routine operations is implemented, e.g. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) data; one off (installation) operations require significant human intervention. Some research to automate processes in offshore wind installations/sub-systems ongoing.
Some evidence of implementation (transformers for offshore wind), applicable to other components
Several O&M models in use, many are deterministic/empirical and would benefit from probabilistic methods.