Reliability analysis of SCADA systems used in the offshore oil and gas industry

“Reliability studies of systems have been an important area of research within electrical engineering for over a quarter of a century. In this thesis, the reliability analysis of the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems used in offshore petroleum facilities was examined. This thesis presents fault trees for the platform production facilities, subsea control systems, a typical SCADA system, and the human induced fault tree. Software reliability was also studied. The fault trees were developed based on a safety flow chart and Process and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&ED). This work was conducted as a subcontract to the United States Department of the Interior, Mineral Management Service, Technology Assessment & Research Program, Program SOL 1435-01-99-RP-3995 (project no 356) to the University of Missouri-Rolla. Based on the fault tree diagrams and fault rates, the reliability of the SCADA system used in the offshore facilities was assessed. The failure availability of the SCADA system used in offshore platforms was also found”--Abstract, page iii