Assessment of a condition-based maintenance policy for Subsea systems: A preliminary study

Abstract

Subsea systems are prone to degradations and failures because they are located in a harsh environment. Their performance can be improved by implementing good maintenance policies, for instance condition based maintenance (CBM). This paper identifies the state of the art of CBM in the subsea systems. A choke valve case is applied to show the added value of CBM. We consider a maintenance model of delayed maintenance for a continuous monitored system subject to gradual and stochastic degradation. To prevent failures and shorten the downtime, an alarm level is settled on the system degradation level for triggering the maintenance plan and operation. Analytical formulations are developed to find the alarm level that minimizes the average unavailability. Numericals examples are given to illustrate the analytical results and simulations. As results, we show for the choke valve the interest of proactive actions and their impacts on the average unavailability