Configuring A Collaborative Virtual Workspace For Disaster Management Of Oil & Gas Offshore Structures
Enio Emanuel Ramos Russo, Alberto Barbosa Raposo, Terrence Fernando, Marcelo Gattass, Börje F. Karlsson · Proceedings of the Joint CIB W78, W102, ICCCBE, ICCC, and DMUCE International Conference on Computing and Decision Making in Civil and Building Engineering, Montreal, Canada, 14-16 June · 2006
There are serious risks involved in running offshore units, with many reported disasters. These disasters can not only cause deaths and important environmental impacts, but also have a strong impact on business. Oil & gas companies are thus continuously seeking to employ processes and technologies to respond to such events in order to ensure safety. Such processes involve collaboration among a large number of groups and resources from different natures and geographically distributed, in order to make appropriate decisions within a short period of time. These groups are comprised of many technical experts and decision makers such as naval engineers, structural engineers, risers analysts and oceanographers, as well as managers. They need to be in constant communication with operators inside the unit, divers, security team, and, perhaps, with experts who are travelling to execute the rescue plan. This work investigates how a distributed workspace environment can support disaster management, involving distributed collaborative technical teams. We first identify the requirements for the distributed workspace, from the stakeholders involved in a disaster, and analyse the commercial emergency systems available. We then elaborate a multi-perspective metamodel to support configuring this collaborative virtual workspace. Finally a prototype for oil & gas offshore structures disaster management based on our multi-perspective metamodel is derived and an HLA-compliant implementation for this prototype is developed as a proof-of-concept of the metamodel.