Digital Outage: Maintenance Planning with 4d Simulation

Oil & Gas facilities needs proper planned maintenance to ensure the equipment and surrounding areas remains to fully operable safe conditions, to maximize operational efficiency of the plant, to reduce unnecessary expenses caused by major breakdowns and to meet legal and environmental regulations. Field experience has shown how maintenance work and planned outage duration can be adversely affected by a lack of appropriate tools and planning methodologies. Part of the equipment have been operating for decades in harsh environment, resulting in oxidation, deformation and corrosion. Oil& Gas operators are going through tough decisions on rejuvenate the equipment and often they face upgrade shutdowns with complex scope. Based on literature, retrofit and upgrade outages can pose more risk than normal maintenance execution as planning of retrofit projects have the added challenge of having to take existing structures, piping, etc. into account. These projects often encounter scope revisions, heavy field reworks, and schedule delays, all of which originate from not having accurate as-built information for design or construction planning. When preparing for a shutdown, accurate technical surveys and outage simulations are crucial for good execution. Simple maintainability surveys can identify many of the complexities of a plant, however the information collected during these surveys may be incomplete or insufficient for a comprehensive site-specific solution. The complexity of assets and maintenance scopes make maintenance planning a considerable challenge.