The POSC/Caesar Association met last month in Stavanger. PCA is a Norwegian standards body that has developed the ISO 15926 standard for oil and gas plant data and is in the forefront of the use of ‘Semantic Web’ technology in the upstream. The ‘POSC’ part of PCA comes from a long forgotten link with Energistics’ previous manifestation. The Caesar connection refers, not to Julius, but to an earlier Norwegian standards initiative.
As a Norwegian entity, much of PCA’s activity is driven by Statoil whose Oscar Fredagsvik traced the evolution and deployment of ISO 15926 from the 2008 Global Operations Data Integration (GODI) project that set out to ‘refine plant data into knowledge.’ Under GODI, IBM developed its OMM reference architecture a.k.a. the IIF with its ‘reference semantic model’ spanning the whole standards smorgasbord from ISA 88/95 to WITSML passing through Mimosa, UN/CEFACT and more. GODI, which has now blended into Statoil’s Master Program IT (MapIT) promises ‘non intrusive integration’ with existing data sources. Statoil is now working on another component of MapIT—a real time visualization framework of information workspaces and collaboration tools. A use case showed how a simple query for well head pressure trends currently implies knowledge of tag numbers, database information and maybe even a request to operators for clarification. MapIT is to fix such issues and will provide information seamlessly into Statoil’s applications.
Jennifer Sampson (Statoil) presented work done on combining RFID technology with ISO 15926 (a joint industry project backed by OLF1, BG, BP, ConocoPhillips, GDF Suez, Shell and Statoil.) The project set out to define the requirements of the oil and gas industry for RFID deployment in areas including personnel monitoring, cargo tracking, drill string components tracking and the management of equipment. Again, ISO 15926 was used to develop an RFID Ontology. So far 65 concepts have been defined and mapped in the Protégé Ontology WorkBench. The resulting ISO 15926 RFID ontology can be extended to other industry domains. The spec is data and time aware—so that equipment can be tracked in time for dispatch, reception, inspection etc. A spatial representation allows for location tracking. A set of nine OLF-approved guidelines for the deployment of Radio Frequency Identification is now available (links/1007_2).
Richard Harris recapped Woodside’s voyage through engineering standards and data management. Early work with EPISTLE and STEP failed to gain traction as these projects were not really aligned with Woodside’s requirements, EPC deliverables and the engineering software needed to support Woodsides’s ‘mega’ projects. Since then, Woodside has identified critical documents and data sets required for its asset life cycle information system (ALIS). ALIS houses generic engineering deliverables—with no ‘gold plating.’ Harris believes that the owner operator world is maturing and today is in a position to define and expect quality information deliverables. Moreover, some project design tools have mutated into production systems for operating and modifying facilities. The trick is to ‘Keep it short and straightforward.’ For Woodside, the reliable, quickest to implement, easiest to use and lowest cost solution is ALIS—which embeds AVEVA’s VNET portal for a single point of data entry and access. And the key part of ISO 15926, for Woodside, is the pragmatic Part 4—the parts list.
Alan Johnson of the Open O&M Consortium drew a demarcation line between ISO 15926 as a ‘reference environment,’ while MIMOSA/Open O&M is an ‘operations environment.’ Between the two a ‘transformation engine,’ running on an ‘information bus,’ is required. The ISO 13374 standard for machine condition assessment data processing and information flow also ran. Echoing the upstream ‘what is a well’ initiative, Johnson described a MIMOSA/PCA joint venture that is trying to define a globally unique ID for assets. This should link up with the RFID work above and all be rolled into the Open O&M Information System Bus—a.k.a. the ‘intergalactic systems bus.’ More from www.posccaesar.org.
1 Oljeindustriens Landsforening—the Norwegian oil and gas trade association.
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