Safety management of offshore structures: overview

Abstract

Safety management is a highly crucial process implemented in offshore structures for meeting safety criteria by eliminating potential risks. Accordingly, safety indicators are utilized to monitor the systems and assess the safety performance by meeting SMARTER criteria. Partly, the historical development of the reliability and risk assessment methods are extensively discussed along with their advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, this paper focuses on the review of safety management processes and their elements including safety indicators as well as discusses the process of optimizing maintenance strategies using reliability and risk assessment approaches for offshore structures. The paper’s results showed that utilizing SMARTER criteria for monitoring and evaluating the safety performance of offshore structures produced the most adequate safety system. For instance, the safety performance evaluation framework displayed functionality for benchmarking and constant enhancement of the Malaysian offshore oil and gas platforms through conducting a comparison between 14 safety factors using a scoring system in order to fully determine the mechanisms and interactions of the factors with the safety performance. Lastly, safety performance is established as a reference for the improvement of safety practices in offshore structures where the risk indicator system can provide a scientific benchmark for risk mitigation and investment decisions.