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operating the wells. The midstream process contains the gathering, refining,
processing, storing, and transporting of oil and gas. The downstream process
contains retailing and distributing it. Some of the important operations in these
processes, such as the exploration and refinery, are executed at plants. The im-
portant factors to mitigate the risks in these plants are manual operations done
by plant workers. Although operations in these plants are highly automated,
there are still many manual operations. The plant workers manipulate plant
equipment in order to perform these operations.
The plant workers play a critical role in safe production. According to Bayerl
and Lauche [5], which investigated and observed the activities of oil production,
the task performed by plant workers is “to keep the plant running by exporting
gas at a maximum rate.” However, according to investigations conducted by the
U.S. Department of the Interior [6], human error caused 41% of all the accidents
at offshore plants near the U.S. coast in 2000. From these data, we can say that
the manual operations done by the plant workers have some human related risks
that may cause accidents while the plant workers are trying to safely run the
plants. In general, it is unrealistic to eradicate the human related risks as long as
there are manual operations. One of the ways to mitigate these risks is to raise
the level of the safety awareness of the plant workers. Sneddon et al. [7] suggested
that oil and gas companies should provide training programs that focus on the
cognitive skill of each plant worker in order to improve their awareness. O'Dea
and Flin [8] clarified that the human factors, such as communication and job
experience, are the critical requirements of leadership for safe production. These
studies focus on the activities of the plant workers to mitigate the human related
risks. However, while it is possible to reduce the risks, it is not possible to reduce
them to zero. Therefore, we need to consider the human related risk tolerance
from the viewpoint of the human activities to ensure safer production.
We propose an estimation method for the production rate limit for the human
related risk tolerance in this study. The production rate limit is the maximum
production rate of plants with no accidents. We assume that the amount of
problems with risks is proportional to three factors, the production rate, the
plant size, and the plant equipment degradation rate. Using this assumption,
we constructed an Agent-based Simulation (ABS) model to estimate the limits.
The simulation represents that the plant workers solve the problems generated
with a probability decided by focusing on the three factors. We also show that
the problems produce accidents over time. Using the simulation, we calculated
the maximum production rate of the plants with no accidents.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. First, Section 2 lists the related
work in the area of production estimation and ABS. Next, Section 3 explains
our proposed model. Then, Section 4 shows our experimental results. Finally, the
meanings of the current results and the limitations of the model are discussed
in Section 5, and this paper is concluded in Section 6.
