Work force assignment and planning for onshore oil and gas wells cementing operations

Abstract

In oil and gas well cementing operations, workers are exposed to long consecutive hours of work and irregular off times due to the nature of such service and inefficient workforce assignment. Overloading human resources increases the potential of errors during service execution, which is mostly considered catastrophic in this field of services. Efficiency of human resources overall reduces as they become over utilized. Finally, loyalty of employees to the company becomes unstable. The objective of this project is to develop a more efficient workforce assignment policy for oil and gas well cementing operations. Cementing operation is critical and vital in a life cycle of any oil or gas well. Operating companies consider this operation as one of the most critical operations during the construction of a well and they explicitly place a zero margin of error in this operation. A case study from the land field of Dukhan is examined in this project. An international oil field services provider is the current service provider for cementing services. The main deficiency of the existing planning policy is the overloading of resources performing the service operation. The project ultimately aims to reduce the average positive deviation from the maximum shift duration for each member of the service team. A sub-objective of the project is limit the maximum waiting time a drilling rig spend waiting on crew members to execute the job to 24 hours. Methodology of the project starts by studying the current personnel deployment policy and defining the problem. Following that, previous operational data is collected over the span of 1 year and probability distributions are determined for uncertain variables. Finally, the new proposed planning policy is simulated in AnyLogic Multimethod Simulation software to examine its efficiency, where generated data is collected, analyzed and compared to the existing planning policy. The combination of both the project methodology and the relevant literature review provide strong bases for developing alternative personnel assignment policies. Methodology in general is considered a good foundation for staff assignment problems, while literature review gives insight for the possibility of improving current assignment policy in order to have a more balanced work load distribution. Obtained results confirm superiority of proposed planning policy. Average positive deviation dropped considerably compared to the current assignment policy. Drilling rig waiting time remains below pre-set maximum waiting time. Thus, proposed policy enhanced personnel assignment without compromising the integrity of operations.