Digital Transformation of Process Safety Valve Compliance and Deficiency Management in Offshore Operations
Suradech Kongkiatpaiboon
Offshore Technology Conference Asia (OTC Asia), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2026 · OTC-36708-MS
Pressure safety valves are a last line of defence offshore, but their sizing records, datasheets and maintenance history were spread across disconnected spreadsheets and systems, so compliance gaps went unnoticed. This project mapped the whole valve lifecycle and built a low-code platform that centralizes the data, checks every valve against current standards, and adds dashboards for compliance, reliability benchmarking and root-cause analysis. It moved valve management from reactive and expert-dependent to proactive and risk-based, while saving a large amount of engineering time.
Key results
- Manual tracking and reporting effort fell by more than 70%
- Long-standing leaks and bellows failures were found, helping avoid incidents that had previously cost up to millions of dollars per event
- Root-cause case: the valve with the most failures was traced to pump cavitation or vapor lock from insufficient suction liquid, and once that was fixed the valve returned to normal
- Root-cause case: a pilot-operated PSV that kept leaking was found to operate below 30% of its set pressure; injecting nitrogen into the pilot dome stopped the leaks
Approach
- Assessed more than 600 PSVs across several offshore facilities against API 520/521 and company standards, and ranked the gaps by risk
- Compared manual-workflow, off-the-shelf asset-management, fully custom and low-code options, and chose low-code for its speed, flexibility and integration with existing systems
- Built a central data model in which Python pipelines and SharePoint link calculation notes, datasheets, P&IDs (digitized with the platform's AI text recognition), HAZOP reports and maintenance plans into one PSV inventory
- Delivered compliance and work-order dashboards benchmarked against OREDA industry failure rates, plus a sizing-scenario knowledge library
- Added a troubleshooting tool that uses cluster analysis of nearby sensor time-series data to explain valves that fail often
The problem
PSV data spread across many outdated sources, combined with complex sizing rules and changing standards, caused recurring design deficiencies, costly incidents and heavy dependence on a few experienced engineers.
Tools & methods
Summary written for this site from the published paper. For figures, data and the full method, read the paper on OnePetro.