Selecting Project Portfolio in the Petroleum Industry (SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology)

This book discusses the multicriteria analysis of project portfolio in the petroleum industry, detailing the major decision-making methods as well as introducing new approaches and considering new findings on scale problems for multicriteria portfolio selection.

Beginning with an overview of the oil and gas sector, it offers a brief introduction to oil and gas exploration and production (E&P) projects, before going on to detail the conceptual basis for the development and application of the proposed decision-making models. The authors discuss project analysis, the multi-objective nature of the decision context, and the importance of synergy assessment, providing readers with a solid grounding before continuing on to portfolio selection.

The remaining chapters address the methodological basis for utilizing additive multicriteria approaches to tackle the portfolio problem in the petroleum industry. They explore portfolio selection based on additive multicriteria portfolio analysis (AMPA), and give an outline of multi-attribute value theory (MAVT) and multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT). The authors contend that as portfolio selection is a problem of choosing from a set of feasible portfolios, it makes sense to aggregate multicriteria information at the portfolio level of outcomes; they therefore put forward two additive approaches to portfolio selection for this purpose. Lastly, reality-based applications are set out to fully demonstrate each model’s steps, as well as to discuss their usefulness and the practical issues that may arise.

This book is a valuable resource for decision-makers within an industrial context, and to graduate students and researchers in both operational research and the petroleum industry.