Over the past two decades the oil and gas industry has paid attention to the need of achieving reliability in well design. Reliability issues were addressed with little or no additional effort above and beyond standard design and quality management practice. However, as the focus of the business shifts to higher risk deepwater projects, reliability and risk management have taken center stage. As the consequences of failure increase it becomes increasingly important to invest in reliability analysis, testing and failure prevention efforts.

Some of the critical issues that need to be taken into account by project teams involved in the design of reliable subsea systems concern the test policy of the system and its impact on costs and benefits. Downhole Safety Valve (DHSV) is a safety system associated with well constructions in field development (Jacinto [1]). With the experience gathered by Petrobras, research efforts have been carried to estimate optimum periodic test of DHSV components in order to assure safety standards and, at same time, to reduce the annualized associated cost. In this paper, a simple multiobjective genetic algorithm (MOGA) approach to DHSV test-scheduling optimization is presented, and an example of application is carried out to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach. The results obtained with the proposed approach show that the genetic algorithm optimization approach is adequate to deal with that kind of problem.