DNV GL Eyes Dynamic Risk Assessment
Traditional risk management practices involves operators navigating large static risk reports, in addition to handling massive amounts of data, with a limited timeframe to make risk informed decisions during operations.
DNV GL launches a position paper showing how risk assessments can be made more dynamic, to provide improved and real-time decision support during operations.
Static quantitative risk assessment (QRA) reports are widely used in the oil and gas industry to evaluate the safety of activities and systems. However, in operation, the risk picture will change, based on degradation of safety-critical barriers, changing production conditions, modifications to assets etc.
Effective operational support requires easy access to updated risk results and the ability to obtain quick real-time answers to new questions that arise.
Further, digitalization is on a rise in the oil and gas sector, enabling efficiencies and cost reductions, and operators are increasingly focusing on harvesting insights from ‘big data’ from sensors.
The challenge is to make sense of the data to improve risk management. The latter requires that condition monitoring data is put into context with a risk model, to provide insights on how changes impact the risk. The position paper by researchers in DNV GL demonstrates concepts on how to develop dynamic and real-time risk assessment methods and tools for the future.
Dynamic risk assessment implemented in (near) real-time tools can provide an updated risk picture and enhance the ability to learn from experience and adapt to new conditions. However, to make risk assessments dynamic, it is not enough to merely re-compute risk measures based on current conditions.