Identifying defective valves in a blowout preventer valve network

Abstract

Blowouts are nancially damaging for drilling companies and are ecological hazards. Hence blowout prevention equipment is critical infrastructure for drilling companies. Blowout preventer valves are important components of blowout prevention equipments and need to be checked regularly. However, since these valves are often physically inaccessible, they are checked in batches called test sets. In this paper we present an exact method to check the functional status of all blowout preventer valves using a minimum number of test sets. We also present a heuristic method to identify malfunctioning valves if they exist. We illustrate both methods using a real world example.