What is ISO 20815?

ISO 20815 — “Petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries — Production assurance and reliability management” — is the international standard that frames how reliability is managed, through design and operation, to meet production targets. The current edition is ISO 20815:2018; check for the latest edition for contractual work.

The standard provides a framework rather than a single calculation. Broadly, it addresses:

• Production assurance — the activities that ensure a facility delivers its planned output across the life cycle.
• The reliability-management process — how reliability work is planned and carried through project phases, from concept to operation.
• Production-availability analysis — quantifying expected production against a planned reference, accounting for failures, maintenance and capacity.

The concept ISO 20815 is best known for is production availability: not simply whether the system is up or down, but how much of theplanned production it actually delivers. A plant that loses one of three trains may drop to two-thirds output rather than to zero — production availability captures that partial loss, which a plain up/down availability figure misses.

For the full taxonomy — inherent, operational and production availability — see types of availability.

Ramly produces the numbers a production-assurance study works in. By assigning real-unit throughput capacities to blocks, a simulation reports production availability and lost production in real units (e.g. t/h), not just a percentage — the output ISO 20815-style studies are framed around. It also models the maintenance, spares and logistics reality that determines operational performance.

Ramly is a modelling tool, not a certification of compliance: it gives you the production- availability analysis; conforming to the standard’s full management framework is a project-level activity.