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3 Systems engineering and Statoil natural gas transport operations
Author(s) -
Dahl Hans Jørgen
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
incose international symposium
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2334-5837
DOI - 10.1002/j.2334-5837.1999.tb00223.x
Subject(s) - directive , process (computing) , liquefied natural gas , legislature , petroleum industry , multidisciplinary approach , natural gas , conceptual framework , computer science , engineering , operations research , social science , operating system , archaeology , environmental engineering , sociology , history , programming language , waste management , philosophy , epistemology
Abstract This paper reviews the conceptual theory of systems engineering (SE). It concludes that SE offers an appropriate approach to considering existing and future needs and challenges related to Statoil's natural gas transport operations. It suggests that SE, including related methods and tools, be introduced into future strategic management planning and decision making processes. The strength of the conceptual approach lies in its ability to handle large numbers of different parameters. This is quite useful, since decision‐making in this industry often involves many multidisciplinary characteristics. These parameters derive typically from technical, commercial, political, organisational and legislative needs and challenges. A particularly important challenge involves industry compliance with the forthcoming process of market liberalisation introduced by the new European Union (EU) directive on natural gas. The paper identifies and applies major conceptual SE building blocks, such as defining hardware, bioware and software, pinpointing needs and system requirements and trade‐off analyses. It concludes that SE is an appropriate approach in decision‐making processes related to topics such as gas and oil field resource management, development of transport tariff regimes and sales contracts, gas blending, storage and line packing procedures as well as organisational development. The paper is an extract from and synthesis of the author's working reports on SE and related subjects.