A New Framework for the Simulation of Offshore Oil Facilities at the System Level

Offshore oil facilities are complex industrial systems: They are composed of numerous parts and involve both elaborate physics and stochastic aspects like failure risk or price variation. Several software tools are available to simulate individual components of offshore facilities, for instance to compute the flow dynamics in a particular device. There is however no tool to simulate the facility at the system level, i.e. to simulate the general behavior of the facility. The paper presents a framework for such a system-level simulator, which includes one layer for physics and one for risk simulation. The physical part uses the equation-based language Modelica[1]. Modelica components are defined to model typical devices of an installation. The risk simulation usesMarkov chains and statistical indicators to assess performance and resilience of the system. It runs with an external language (C or Scilab) and data from the Modelica simulation.