Safety assessment of offshore platforms is an urgent task. Such assessments are now focusing on the structure, maintenance,
and retirement of a platform. Some methods employed have many shortcomings. For example, they cannot make the reliability
adequately explicable. Therefore, a mathematical tool, the unascertained measure, was introduced. First, the basic knowledge
of the unascertained sets was introduced briefly. Second, the unascertained measure was defined and credible identification
was set up. The method has been introduced into the fields for safety assessment of a jacket loadout procedure. Engineering
practices showed that it can complete the safety assessment systematically and scientifically without any assumption. The
work should have significance in theory and practice for offshore engineering.
Keywords safety assessment - offshore platform - installation - unascertained measure - information entropy
Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (505079047)