The main advantages of the CRIOP method is the ability of reducing costs and risks in the design process. The CRIOP analysis is under a continous development, thus it is future-oriented.

Cost reducing

The cost of changes increases significant between each phase in the design process. Experience shows that the cost of a change increases exponentially between each phase. The cost of a change could be:

     1-10 kNOK in the analysis phase
     10-100 kNOK in the design phase
     100-1,000 kNOK in the build phase and
     1,000-10,000 kNOK in the operations phase

Increased change costs is illustrated to the right.

The CRIOP methodology leads to a good requirement specification and thereby redusing the risk for costly changes at a later stage in the project.

Risk reducing

One of the key functions with control rooms, cabins and panels is to provide safety critical barriers against major hazards. Despite this, and the emphasis placed on safety and the environment by the petroleum industry, a number of problems exist that both individually and collectively reduce the efficiency of these safety barriers. As noted by the NPD (2003), examples include:

"The control room operator having to deal with too many alarms simultaneously, several safety critical tasks that have to be performed simultaneously, operating stations as well as communications and display equipment that should be used simultaneously is located distant to each other, operators work load is uneven and at times relatively high, there is a lack of a total overview of events/incidents." (NPD 2003, Human Factors Assessment Method)

Future-oriented

In addition to the typical problems to be found in a control room, and the interrelationships between these problems, there are a number of trends in the petroleum industry that will also impact the safe and efficient operation of the control centre. As noted by the NPD (2003) these include:

"Increasing technological complexity in control rooms (integration of traditionally separated interfaces - process/safety),new functions and tasks allocated to the control room (e.g. helicopter transit, environmental monitoring, telephone exchange) without a corresponding increase in manning, process output is being pushed above design limits over long periods of time."

A systematic method is therefore needed to identify the typical problems that exist in control rooms today, test how multiple safety barriers function, and take account of trends in the petroleum industry. The CRIOP method attempts to address these needs.