Publications

Incidents are the most preventable event in the oil and gas industry. To prevent an incident occurring, significant contributing factors have to be identified and analyzed. The research of this paper covers the importance of each of these factors in contributing to an incident. Specific weighting factors will be applied to show the degrees of importance to an incident cause. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology has been used in recent decades to determine weighting factors in multi-criterion decision making. Developed by Thomas L. Saaty in 1970s, the Analytical Hierarchy Process demonstrates consistent results in determining both qualitative and quantitative factors. The Analytic Hierarchy Process in this paper is developed by combining two layers of criteria. The first layer is composed of descriptive statistics of past years incidents, and the second layer consists of qualitative judgment based on the expertise of the questioner. The questioner could involve production engineers, safety engineers, and head of services related to operational entities in an Oil and Gas Company. There are three factors weighted in this questioner: 1. Human Factor leading to Unsafe Acts, 2. Job Factor Leading to Unsafe Working Conditions, 3. Management System Dysfunction. Statistical data is used to determine the second layer of AHP implementation. Incident data is gathered from company’s database of the past seven year’s incidents. The statistics describe the most frequent type of incident occurring during the company’s operations. The result of this study provides a determination of importance of factors involving the causes of incidents. Based on these factors, compensatory measures can be applied to prevent incidents occurring. Keywords: Analytic Hierarchy Process, Incident Analysis, multi-criterion decision making