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• ANNUAL REPORT 2013
Alternative methods for quantifying the
safety of offshore structures protected by
Ice Management
Optimizing the design of offshore structures towithstand
ice actions is a challenging task and various efforts are
under way to develop robust concepts with accept-
able structural safety. To ameliorate the deficiencies
of structural design and to reduce the costs of Arctic
offshore field developments, ice management opera-
tions may be considered. Ice management in sea ice will
typically involve use of 1 to 4 icebreakers depending on
the operating environment. The ice management fleet is
aimed at protecting the offshore installation by break-
ing the incoming ice into smaller pieces and by reducing
the confinement in the ice cover. Failure of such a
marine operation in the demanding Arctic environment
can threaten the integrity of the offshore platforms or
drilling units. Therefore, it is of crucial importance to
understand the causes of such potential failure and the
influencing factors in order to plan for and mitigate the
risks.
Farid-Afshin investigated different methods to model
factors that have a soft causal influence on the total risk.
He developed a model where he created a structure
for risk influencing factors affecting the basic events
of a conventional fault tree analysis regarding an ice
management operation. The overall intension was to
identify such human and organizational factors that can
influence the probability of failure of an Arctic operation
and to treat the problem using a Bayesian mathematical
framework. The methodology can be used in an inverse
manner as a tool for risk control as more operations
need to be planned for future developments. Based on
the results from this work, Farid-Afshin wrote a confer-
ence paper that will be published in OMAE’14.
The research of Farid-Afshin is about quantifying the
safety of Arctic offshore structures over their life time,
which should cater for both long- and short term varia-
tions of the ice loads. In addition to the conventional
Farid-Afshin looking at radar showing the ice conditions around oden during oATRC2013.
Photo: Sveinung Løset