Safety Assessment of Offshore Installations Using a Computer Model

Summary

Safety evaluations of concepts for offshore installations are in Norway required at several stages during the development of a platform. Practical work on this matter has revealed that improvements in the methods of analysis are advantageous in order to improve efficiency, and a computer model (COCOS) has been developed into a practical tool for efficient safety evaluation.

COCOS (Coarse Concept Safety Analysis) has primarily been developed in order to enable safety evaluation of different platform concepts at a feasibility stage of development. Few details are known about the concept at this stage. Safety evaluation may be performed as a comparison between competing concepts, or as an absolute assessment of a single concept relative to acceptance criteria.

Another main aspect of COCOS is that the evaluation is quick to complete, so that impact on decisions may be accomplished in a timely way. For the purpose of providing a quick and straightforward analysis the effort accomplished by the analyst is restricted to an evaluation of how the various concepts may respond to certain pre-defined accidental events with associated effects. Simplified models for both frequency assessment and accidental effect assessment are provided for the accidental events