Norway came to Houston last month for the US member meet of the POSC Caesar Association. PCA develops and manages engineering lifecycle standards used in the offshore construction industry. Nils Sandsmark traced the history of PCA which started as a Norwegian R&D project in 1993 and which now has 34 corporate members in 8 countries. PCA originally leveraged the EPISTLE engineering data model of the 1990s which has seen real world deployment by a significant number of major projects, engineering contractors and owner operators. EPISTLE has since evolved into the ISO 15926 data standard which is to be finalized in 2010.
Development of PCA standards is largely driven by Norway’s Integrated Operations projects—leveraging standards from the world wide web consortium. In particular, automation of the next generation IO phase will utilize the W3C’s Semantic Web technologies (OITJ January 2009) of ontologies for automated reasoning and rule-based inference.
Much of PCA’s activity revolves around the establishment of reference data sets of engineering information. PCA has teamed with the US-based FIATECH organization on development of a reference data services with governance for interfacing with ISO and for maintenance of the reference data.
In Norway, the next generation of standards will come from a new Integrated Operations in the High North (IOHN) project that will look into unmanned drilling and production, production optimization and sub-ice operations. These are to be facilitated by further development of the ‘semantic oil and gas platform’ and ‘information assurance networks’ built around web services, subsea sensor networks and control systems and embedded information quality systems.
The semantic oil and gas platform will see enhancements to ISO 15926 based oil and gas ontology and the development of a prototype information validation service. A prototype web services platform will be designed to support automatic monitoring, simulation and optimization. A ‘semantic platform’ is at the heart of the whole process. IOHN participants include StatoilHydro, IBM, DNV, National Oilwell Varco, FMC, SAS Institute, Kongsberg, PCA and Norwegian trade body OLF. The project has a forecast budget of $10 million.
PCA, ShareCat and the E&P Information Management Association (EPIM) are working on a commercial model for disseminating ISO 15926 reference data and ShareCat’s catalog and documents. The plan is to provide equipment information for projects from ‘NorHub,’ a hosted database of equipment data for the offshore industry. NorHub should be operational later this year.
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