Risk-Based Maintenance Optimization for a Subsea Production System with Epistemic Uncertainty

The lack of operation and maintenance data brings difficulties to traditional risk assessment based on probability methods. Therefore, experts are invited to evaluate the key performance indicators related to system risk. These evaluation results are usually described by ambiguous language, so they have epistemic uncertainty. Uncertainty theory is a branch of mathematics used to model experts’ degrees of belief. The uncertain measure has duality, that is, some symmetry, which means that the sum of the uncertain measure of an event and the uncertain measure of its complementary set is equal to 1. Therefore, the risk occurrence time of each basic event evaluated by experts is modeled by the uncertain variable in this article. Then, the risk assessment method of systems with epistemic uncertainty is proposed based on an uncertain fault tree analysis. Furthermore, two risk-based maintenance optimization models for systems with epistemic uncertainty are established. In particular, the leakage risk assessment method and the two risk-based maintenance optimization models for a subsea production system are considered, and the optimization results are given. The optimization results can help practitioners to warn of the leakage risk and make scientific maintenance decisions based on expert knowledge, so as to extend the service life of subsea production systems.