System Readiness Level Estimation of Oil and Gas Production Systems

This paper explores further and describes the System Readiness Level estimation for means of production in the oil and gas industry, through a case study. The concept as Technology Readiness Level (TRL) originally promoted by NASA and was then adopted by government agencies and industries across the USA and Europe. TRL was adopted by API (API 17N) and tailored for the assessing the readiness of subsea components for inclusion in subsea production systems. The API’s TRL has been recently extended by introducing two more metrics namely, the Integration Readiness Level (IRL) and the System Readiness Level (SRL). SRL is a mathematical combination TRL and IRL and is a metric for assessing progress in developing major subsea systems. Standard assessment metrics, such as Technology Readiness Levels (TRL), do not sufficiently evaluate the modern complex systems. Building on the previous publications [43] the SRL calculation method is expanded and expounded by adding a system engineering framework for the process of SRL estimation. Explained in some detail, in this paper, which produces more consistent results. Using an error averaging method, SRL is calculated by combining the TRL of each component with IRL, which expresses the readiness of each of these components to be integrated with other components of the system. To facilitate the calculation the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) is used both to visualise components and perform the necessary arithmetic.