On the Simulation of Offshore Oil Facilities at the System Level.

Abstract

Offshore oil facilities are complex systems that innvolve elaborate physics combined with stochastic aspects related, for instance, to failure risk or price variation. Although there exist many dedicated softwaretools to simulate flows typically encountered in oil exploitations, there is still no tool that combines physical (mostly engineering fluid mechanics) and risk simulation. Such a tool could be useful to engineers or decision makers for specification, design and study ofoffshore oil facilities. We present a first step towards the creation of such a tool. Our current simulator is based on new Modelica components to simulate fluid flows and on stochastic simulation at a higher level, for modeling risk and costs. Modelica components implement physical models for single and two-phase flows in some typical devices of an offshore field. The risk simulation uses Markov chains and statistical indicators to assess performance and resilience of the system over several months or years of operation.