American Oil and Gas Reporter - November 2015 - 42

to find previously unseen patterns and correlations that could be useful in making decisions and solving complex problems.
The oil and gas industry stands to benefit from big data analytics as much as any
commercial sector, largely because historically, it has acquired and managed more
data than any other sector.

"Just as tablets and
smart phones have seen
wide adoption as standard
tools in the field, so will
be new computing and
connectivity devices not
yet fully imagined."

42 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER

Security Risks
As digital density increases, security exposures increase. The two are wound
around each other like DNA. More information, computing and control systems inherently add both physical and cyber security risks. The nature of oil and gas assets
and operations mean that cyber-physical security exposures extend to suppliers and all
the personnel that come onto an oil field.
There is always interactivity in a connected world, which also increases security risk. There are very few instances
where technology stands by itself; ultimately it has to interact through some other set of platforms.
For example, the simple act of downloading a new application to a cell phone
depends on a mobile network and computing infrastructure never seen and rarely
considered. Controlling what data are
shared and where data travel is a complex
and risk-filled proposition. Controlling that
risk takes a combination of technology and
processes. Not surprisingly, security in the
digital oil field continues to be a major area
of academic and industry research.
There are thousands of applications for
data management and control. Figuring out
how to better operate these and the thousands of process controllers in a field is a
major challenge. With a little more data
and a more sophisticated way of thinking
about the data, the infrastructure could operate far more efficiently.
For example, consider the value that
comes from identifying the biggest maintenance risks in a producing field. If
those risks could be determined, the
maintenance schedule could be adjusted
to mitigate them. With a sufficient number of measurements and a realistic understanding of how all these systems work
and function together, it is possible to predict when maintenance should be performed to avoid breakdown situations and
to eliminate the need for repairs.
This kind of dynamic maintenance
schedule predicts failures, and potentially avoids them altogether. The time to address a problem is when the risk of failure starts to rise. This is, of course, a complex challenge, especially in oil and gas
where there is multigenerational technology in many fields. Ultimately, the goal
is operational excellence, where there
are zero failures, unplanned shutdowns or

safety incidents.

Human/Machine Interface
The number of human/machine interfaces (HMIs) and the ways in which people interact with data are starting to become
overwhelming. When data volume grows
by a factor of 1,000, which it will in the
next decade or sooner, the traditional approaches to the HMI will need to change.
The oil and gas industry was the first
large-scale industrial user of graphics and
graphical computing. There is a clear opportunity for the industry to again assume
the lead by adopting applications based on
gaming technology. People interact with
games in fundamentally different ways than
they do with traditional office and scientific applications. The underlying technology is likewise fundamentally different,
supporting vastly more data visualization
and ad hoc decision making in real time.
Considering the power of that underlying technology and the thousands of
hours of practice that young users have
with gaming interfaces, there is huge
leverage to be had in adopting gaming
technology in oil and gas business computing functions. Certainly, sectors such
as the military have learned that gaming
presents a much more efficient way to get
people to interact with data and make realtime decisions based on their training.
In many ways, the untouched opportunity is the entire way in which humans interact with ever-richer and exponentially
growing data volumes. Consider the challenge in terms of traditional engineering
drawing systems. There is a predefined decision tree inherent in engineering drawing applications that determines what the
user can do and how data are displayed.
In the gaming paradigm, the decision tree
is recomputed with every action, but it is only
partly recomputed and then simulators are
used. This visualization technique leverages
the data and what we know about them to
produce a scene that is realistic and rendered
in real time. Similarly, real-time systems act
on the data at hand to move the users to the
next decision by determining what to recompute and display. While this recomputation
happens at every step, it does not run very
deep and is fast enough to be nearly transparent to the user.
The tree itself changes in this paradigm,
depending on the decisions made. The
many permutations could never be designed ahead because there would be trillions of branches on the decision tree. The
number of potential branches grows exponentially, but with gaming technology, only
the branches followed are actually computed. This is a fundamental paradigm change
from traditional computing workflows.
A gaming approach to engineering de-

American Oil and Gas Reporter - November 2015

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