An Improvement of Assessing As-built Burial Risk for Subsea Cables

Available methods using the burial measurements to assess the subsea cable installations risks compare measurements to the design boundaries. The disadvantage of using this is that the assumed cable burial depths and their measurements can differ. However, it is unclear how the uncertainty in depth affects burial risk; hence, there is a need to verify the burial operations using a proper method to handle this aspect of risk reliability. We proposed a conservative cable burial scenario test, which evaluates the highest deviation between the measured risk and the design risk to indicate differences in risk based on the measurements. The result shows that the most significant deviation could be up to 55%. It proves that measurement uncertainty significantly affects the final risk evaluation. Moreover, this deviation in verifiable risk is not considered in today’s boundary-level verification methodology.