Reliability analysis of multiplex control system of subsea blowout preventer based on stochastic Petri net

Abstract

The multiplex (MUX) control system of subsea blowout preventer (BOP) plays a vital role in providing safe working conditions for the subsea drilling activities. According to the working states and critical failure modes of the MUX control system, this paper presents its stochastic Petri nets (SPN) model, taking into account the imperfect fault detection capacity. The numerical analysis method is proposed based on the isomorphic continuous-time Markov chain of the model. The reliability indexes, namely reliability, availability and MTTF of the MUX control system and pilot hydraulic control system are obtained and compared. In addition, the effects of fault coverage factor on state probabilities and availability of the MUX control system are researched and the uncertainty analysis of the firing rates related to MTTF is also performed.

Keywords

• availability
• multiplex control system
• reliability
• Stochastic Petri nets
• subsea blowout preventer