BP joins ‘Smart Chips’

BP joins construction industry standards body FIATECH, signing up to RFID ‘smart chips’ and ISO 15926 ‘work-in-progress’ projects. The WIP targets handover, maintenance and operations.

BP’s North America unit has joined the FIATECH standards body to further R&D on radio frequency identification devices (RFID) and its ground-breaking use of the ISO 15926 plant data management spec.

FIATECH

FIATECH is part of the Construction Industry Institute, a research unit in the College of Engineering of the University of Texas at Austin. The FIATECH board has representation from construction software and the chemical industry—but with the increasing complexity of offshore projects, the standardization movement is seeing take-up in oil and gas developments.

Smart Chips

FIATECH’s ‘Smart Chips’ project investigates emerging RFID—technologies that can be adapted for construction, operations and maintenance applications. The project has already completed eight in-field pilots of commercial-ready technologies in construction industry applications.

Pipeline

Projects have addressed RFID applications for site asset tracking and inventory, materials logistics, pipeline monitoring and concrete maturity studies. Chevron’s Ignatius Chan said, ‘Smart Chips allows us to get first hand experience with a new technology at a fraction of the cost of doing it ourselves.’

ISO 15926

The ‘Accelerating Deployment of ISO 15926’ (ADI) project seeks to promote use of plant data standards that have evolved from early work by the Norwegian POSC/Caesar organization. The project has backing from major engineering companies including Fluor and Bechtel and software developers such as Autodesk, Aveva, Bentley and Intergraph. Oil company members include Aramco, ConocoPhillips and Shell.

Handover

The ISO standard is basically a huge database of names and functions for parts used in a construction project. The standard nomenclature eases interaction between owner operators, suppliers, engineering companies and software developers, during plant construction and at the crucial handover stage.

WIP

Similar wins are expected to accrue in the operations phase where ISO 15926 will underpin computer-based maintenance, operations and compliance. The project has now matured to the stage of a Work-In-Progress (WIP) ISO 15926 repository that is ready for deployment.

Greater Plutonia

ISO 15926 underpinned the construction of BP’s Greater Plutonia development (OITJ Sept. 06), a $4 billion project with six FPSOs and 80,000 equipment items. The system is integrated with BP’s SAP ERP package. More on ISO 15926 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15926—and in next month’s Oil IT Journal.

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