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 utilised to monitor systems and assess safety performance by meeting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely, evaluated and reviewed (Smarter) criteria. Partly, the historical development of reliability and risk assessment methods is 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, and it also discusses the process of optimising maintenance strategies using reliability and risk assessment approaches for offshore structures. The results in this paper show that utilising 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 Malaysian offshore oil and gas platforms by conducting a comparison between 14 safety factors using a scoring system to determine fully the mechanisms and interactions of the factors with 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.