Hazard identification of the offshore three-phase separation process based on multilevel flow modeling and HAZOP

HAZOP studies are widely accepted in chemical and petroleum industries as the method for conducting process hazard analysis related to design, maintenance and operation of the systems. Different tools have been developed to automate HAZOP studies. In this paper, a HAZOP reasoning method based on function-oriented modeling, Multilevel Flow Modeling (MFM), is extended with function roles. A graphical MFM editor, which is combined with the reasoning capabilities of the MFM Workbench developed by DTU is applied to automate HAZOP studies. The method is proposed to support the "brain-storming" sessions in traditional HAZOP analysis. As a case study, the extended MFM based HAZOP methodology is applied to an offshore three-phase separation process. The results show that the cause-consequence analysis in MFM can infer the cause and effect of a deviation used in HAZOP and used to fill HAZOP worksheet. This paper is the first paper discussing and demonstrate the potential of the roles concept in MFM to supplement the integrity of HAZOP analysis.