Environmental knowledge management for enhancing integrated operations

The recent availability of offshore deepwater installations and fiber-optic infrastructures to connect them to centers onshore in real time has made it possible to conduct oil and gas activities in highly fragile areas where the human presence is not poss ible (think for instance of the Arctic region). There, sensors are the only data source available. In order to efficiently make use of this data for risk assessment, environment protection, and also production enhancement, we must leverage the fact that the petroleum industry is characterized by decision-making processes involving users from different disciplines: to foster their practices, the contextual information gathered from the environmental sensors should be turned into something understandable a nd relevant to let them communicate and make right-time decisions through seamless patterns. For instance, if a drilling activity is performed close to a coral reef, does the direction of the generated current harm the corals? Real-time information manage ment can improve the perception and handling of environmental risk. The research question we are trying to address in this research is: how is it possible to obtain a relevant and meaningful model out of this overview for the people who are supposed to us e it? A tool must be designed to allow for the encoding and representation of different levels of knowledge, including techniques supporting the processing of that knowledge based on given rules.