Availability evaluation of oil/gas production and transportation systems

In recent years a number of availability measures for oil/gas production and transportation systems have been proposed. The most commonly used measure seems to be the expected throughput, expressed as a fraction of the demand (or design) throughput. A number of terms are used for this measure; for example ‘production availability’, ‘production regularity‘, ‘throughput availability’, ‘quantity availability’, ‘productibility’, ‘productiveness’ and ‘deliverability’.

In this paper a suggestion of standardization is made. This includes the ‘throughput availability’ term for the above measure, and several other definitions for related availability measures. Modelling and computing aspects are discussed both for an analytical approach and simulation.