Abstract
The increasing complexity of modern socio-technical systems has raised new challenges to analyze the reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety (RAMS) of oil and gas processing facilities. This paper presents a new approach to perform RAMS analysis using stochastic Petri nets modelling blocks. Those blocks are small-sized Petri nets (PN) that independently represent every component of the system. Depending on the component nature, such as repairable component periodically tested, non-repairable/replaced component, or standby component with the probability of failure to start, the PN block models the behaviour and the life cycle changes of the component and subsequently of the entire system. The PN blocks communicate through Boolean variables without being physically connected; this provides a less congested and easily trackable structure. It is observed that the proposed approach provides a robust and reliable mechanism of RAMS analysis. This work constitutes a significant step toward an integrated dynamic model for RAMS analysis. The proposed RAMS model is composed of three strong characteristics: time dependency, robustness, and explicit graphical structure.
