Industrial implementation of risk based inspection planning lessons learned from experience (2) the case of steel offshore structures

Risk Based Inspection (RBI) planning methods for structures have been under development for years. They have now reached a maturity allowing their use in an industrial context. The first applications of detailed RBI where devoted to single components and lately applied in a more extensive way to a set of components, using generic approaches. As being the second part of a report on industrial application of RBI, this present paper focuses on RBI for fixed steel offshore structures. The challenge here is the full implementation of the method to a whole set of offshore platforms. General questions arise, such as how to use detailed RBI planning that builds inspection plans of details to establish inspection campaigns for a given platform and, in a more general way, how to go from detailed RBI planning to inspection campaigns for a set of platforms. Also, several more technical issues have been raised during the studies, such as fatigue computations, push-over analyses, risk acceptance criteria and scheduling phases. This paper presents part of the experiences gained using and applying these RBI methods to a specific field of jackets.