One of the effects of the radically changing energy market is the construction of more and more offshore wind turbines. Many new companies with different levels of experience are entering the market to meet the demand of renewable energy. To this end, we introduce a distributed simulative approach for verifying a safety concept for offshore missions to support the involved companies. In this paper, we present our vision of the emerging simulation environment and introduce the components that we currently work on. More precisely, we introduce a Physical World Simulator (PWS) that allows the simulation of the environment, persons, and resources of offshore operations. The simulator can be interconnected to other simulators and to a Failure and Hazard Observer (FHO) which we also present in the paper. The observer tracks the occurrence of hazards and thus checks if they have been considered while creating a safety concept for an offshore mission. We use the High Level Architecture (HLA) as the simulator communication interface for which we developed a helper library which also extends its features while maintaining compatibility with the standard. The simulation framework enables us to automatically verify the safety concept by performing simulation runs and injecting identified failures.

Safety and dependability are major design objectives for offshore operations such as the construction of wind farms or oil and gas exploration. Today processes and related risks are typically described informally and process specification are neither reusable nor suitable for risk assessment. Here, we propose to use a specification language for processes. We integrate this specification language in a generic modeling approach in combination with an analysis tool and a tool to construct health, safety and environment (HSE) plans — a mandatory document for granting a construction/operation permit. Specifically, for each planned scenario a process is modeled, describing the detailed operation of the involved actors as well as the interaction with resources and environmental conditions. We enrich this process model with hazardous events which is facilitated by integration with an offshore operation generic hazard list, thereby giving access to expert knowledge for the specific situation to be planned. This in turn allows us to perform an automatic quantitative risk assessment using fault tree analysis. We exemplify our approach on a standard offshore operation of personnel transfer from an offshore building to another naval unit by modeling, annotating with hazards, performing the fault-tree analysis, and finally generating HSE plans.

Abstract. The commercial installation of offshore wind farms is still far from having established standards or procedures and puts high demands on employees who deal with uncertainty and risks. We present a modelbased risk assessment approach to support the development of health, safety, and environment (HSE) plans for safe offshore operations. For this purpose, a process model is used to integrate all aspects of these complex and safety-critical operations which involve many different actors, resources, and environmental conditions. On the basis of this model, we are able to identify and precisely describe hazards, quantify their safety impact, and develop risk mitigation means. To this end, we developed methods and tools to support this process, resulting in a formalization of hazardous events that can be used to unambiguously describe the risks of a given offshore operation model. We will demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on a specific offshore scenario.

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