Intelligent Maintenance Practices Within Norwegian Continental Shelf Toward Industry 4.0 Vision: An Overview

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is the future scenario of industrial production since it enables a new level of organising and controlling the entire value chain with the product lifecycle by creating dynamic and real-time understanding of cross-company behaviours. Therefore, most of the oil and gas (O&G) companies at the Norwegian continental shelf (NCS) are looking forward to digitalise and automatize their asset and operations in order to get the promising benefit of industry 4.0. There are recommendations from the ministry of industry toward the industrial digitalisation, together with commercial incentives taken by large-scale oil and gas operating companies. The holistic picture of the status of industry 4.0 at the Norwegian industrial sector is still missing. Industrial managers at the NCS, who are either ready for industry 4.0 or already progressing toward this industrial transition, are still lacking answers to several significant questions. Industry 4.0 originated in manufacturing sector and most of the current experiences are related to that specific sector, thus, can industry 4.0 technologies be useful for companies of operation and maintenance service providers? What would be the specific requirements to revolutionise current maintenance into more intelligent maintenance? Consequentially, the paper tries to present whether complete solutions (i.e. product availability and business models) of intelligent maintenance are available and how mature they are.