A Collaborative Virtual Reality Oil and Gas Workflow

Abstract

The current way of designing industrial plants relies on the communication among experts in the field, and on tools that allow the simulation of the site. Virtual reality (VR) tools are used to visualize and interact with complex 3D environments in real time, and several engineering simulations employ VR to foresee the results of complex industrial operations. The research project described here presents a Service Oriented Architecture aimed to create a collaborative environment, called CEE (Collaborative Engineering Environment) that integrates VR techniques into a system where the execution of different sequences of engineering simulations is modeled as scientific workflows. The focus of this research is on the oil and gas industry, particularly offshore engineering, where the project of a new production unit is a lengthy, expensive and usually is conducted by different specialists who are geographically distributed. Among the integrated engineering simulations are those involving structural calculus, hydrodynamics, naval engineering with mooring systems, meteo-oceanography, and others. The main objective is to improve the users' interpretation capacity and skills while providing visualization tools for a better understanding of the results.