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This Ph.D. thesis aims at building a decision aiding approach for selecting the contractual strategy of complex oil and gas projects. It is supervised by Franck MARLE and Wassila OUERDANE. It takes place as part of the chair “Managing Procurement Risks in Complex Projects” between TOTAL and CentraleSupélec. The chair relies on the skills of the Industrial Engineering laboratory at “CentraleSupélec” in terms of project management, risk management and decision aiding. The Ph. D. thesis takes place within TOTAL, more precisely within two entities: 1) Project office, responsible of the CS of upstream development projects, and 2) Contract & Procurement, responsible for market intelligence studies and the contractual part of the projects.
A development project of a new oil and gas facility starts when the exploration and the appraisal studies estimate the exploitation of the hydrocarbon deposit is economically viable. The complexity and the size of the projects encountered in the industry impose to split them into several pieces, which represent the scope of future contracts. Each scope is then awarded to a contractor with a specific type of contract and selection mode, forming the contractual strategy to adopt in the project. The consequences of an error or insufficient consideration of risks can be enormous from the point of view of Cost, Schedule, or Production once the project delivered.
During the contractual strategy selection process of a development project, the oil company encounters three recurring difficulties related to: 1) the identification of a reasonable and relevant set of alternatives. Due to the large number of possible contracts, and feasible contractual strategies, TOTAL runs the risk of neglecting interesting alternatives; 2) the evaluation of potential alternatives, which depends on criteria from different scales and natures difficult to formalize and aggregate; 3) the need to substantiate the chosen contractual strategy solution. Resolving these challenges will make the selection process more justifiable and relevant.
The research problem is to propose a decision aiding methodology for the development and selection of the most appropriate contractual strategy. It has to be the most performing in terms of Cost and Schedule, but should also consider the risks associated with these performances. In addition, the interfaces between the different contracts should also be considered, because the collective performance of the whole strategy may be degraded compared to the performance of each individual contract.
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Thereby, our work seeks to implement both technical and practical solutions to answer on the one hand the question of identification and generation of a relevant set of alternatives, at contracts and contractual strategy levels. On the other hand, to build and implement a system of estimation and evaluation of contractual strategies, allowing to come up with the most performing proposal to the upstream development project.
To do so, the proposal is a 3 level decision aiding model, which defines decision alternatives at contract level (called elementary level), intermediary level (assembly of several interrelated contracts) and contractual strategy level (the whole project). At each level, alternatives are estimated, screened out, and possibly ranked with the use of Multicriteria decision aiding methods to deal with the faced challenges during the contractual strategy (CS) selection process.
Chapter 1 presents the industrial context, it starts by describing TOTAL group and more specifically the departments involved in the selection process. The main upstream development projects handled in the oil and gas industry are then described. Afterwards, the CS selection process within TOTAL will be presented, with focus on CS components, drivers that intervene during the selection process, and the steps of the process. We will end the chapter by the difficulties that are inherent to this process.
In Chapter 2, the research problem is specified, based on the industrial issue and a literature review two research questions arise: (i) How to generate a relevant set of contractual strategy options? For which literature on Problem Structuring, Work Breakdown Structure, Matrix based Methodologies, and Contracts Management are relevant, (ii) How to build a system of evaluation and comparison of CS alternatives? For which the literature in Multicriteria Decision Aiding (MCDA) field is appropriate.
Chapter 3 aims to present to the reader the proposals made during this work. The first proposal is to follow a 4- steps global theoretical process proposed by (Tsoukiàs, 2008) to (i) represent the problem situation, (ii) to formulate and (iii) model the problem, and to make (iv) a final recommendation. The second proposal is to build our three level decision aiding process, we describe briefly certain steps. The final proposal is to build our own guideline helping the choice of MCDA aggregation methods to the faced decision problems.
The 3-level decision aiding approach will be presented in Chapters 4. It will seek to open up to a relevant set of alternatives, which will be estimated, screened out, then evaluated, in order to come up with a justified contractual strategy proposal to an upstream development project.
Finally, in the last chapter we will draw both industrial and academic conclusions, as well as perspectives to our work.
An example of an onshore LNG project, which will take place in Papua New Guinea, will be used all along this report to illustrate the steps and faced challenges of the contractual strategy selection process but also the steps of our decision aiding approach.

Keywords:

Project Management, Oil and Gas Industry, Contracts Management, Problem Structuring, Multicriteria Decision Aiding Analysis, WBS