Visualizing Safety Indicators: A Study of Requirements

Abstract

The thesis studied the visualization of safety indicators in oil and gas installations. Safety indicators measure the changes in the level of safety, and visualization communicates risk to safety management and specialists. Both aspects are important in the oil and gas industry where safety is a big part of daily operations because of the major hazards that is associated with the production of oil and gas.The first part explored which traits are important for safety indicators and (risk) visualization respectively. This was based on a literature review on the two topics to gather critical points of the current knowledge including substantial findings as well as theoretical and methodological contributions. The findings were then organized into a spreadsheet where it was easy to see what requirements were recurrent and popular, and from this a set of requirements of visualizing safety indicators was then established. This selection of seven requirements was based on the goal that the requirements could apply to both indicators and the visualization, and the relevance of them.The Integrated Operations Maintenance and Modification Planner (IO-MAP) was to be the case for this thesis in order to apply the set of requirements on a test. IO-MAP is a software tool that is developed to support the planning of maintenance and modification activities on offshore installations to help decision-makers gain a better overview which leads to enhanced safety.Results from IO-MAP?s review of the requirements suggest:? Include a total risk picture to visualize the sum of risks connected to the planned tasks per day? Adding more types of work that requires work permit (e.g. isolation of safety system, pressure testing, and work with dangerous and radioactive substances)? Implementing more information about the tasks to get the full picture of the tasks and how they are done in practiceIt was found that not all requirements were suited to test the safety-related information from IO-MAP. This could be due to the fact that not all information from IO-MAP could be directly transferred as visualizing safety indicators rather than being explicitly an indicator or a visualization technique.