Innovating the Future

Earlier this year, Wood teamed up with Abyssal, a 3D visualisation, simulation and digitalisation solutions provider, to provide the latest digital technology aimed at improving the design, constructability, operation and inspection of subsea assets globally.

This complements the company’s ability to offer an innovative approach to subsea project delivery and operations through collaborative software and services in the areas of visualisation, simulation, operations and data management.

Our customers look to us to provide solutions to the complex problems across the energy market landscape. Thinking innovatively, embracing technology and partnering with world-class organisations such as Abyssal enables us to continue to offer expertise and add value to every phase of our customers’ project life cycle. Leveraging these key partnerships in combination with Wood’s extensive engineering and operational expertise, we continue to explore how automation, visualisation and digital eco-systems can enhance project delivery and operations, reduce cost and improve safety offshore.

In the design phase it is well established that the industry is shifting away from using documents as the primary means of capturing and sharing information, and is embracing the world of data.

When planning a subsea development, a significant amount of information needs to be gathered, assessed and shared with numerous stakeholders, engineers, asset managers and field partners. Historically, this was achieved using controlled documents, spreadsheets, and email – all of which take time to prepare and quickly become outdated.

Our subsea data management platform, based upon Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, is the cornerstone of our digital project delivery. It allows us to capture a diverse range of datasets, including geospatial survey, route and layout data, basis of design and engineering information, asset data and fabrication records. Robust automated validation methods are applied to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the data, and a full version history and audit trail are maintained.

By integrating technical and project information onto a single platform, we have a new ‘single source of truth’ that contains the latest, verified data in a centralised location. This can be directly referenced by various engineering and execution tools, and by tracking dependencies we can establish exactly how a change to a particular piece of information may impact the project or system.

We are now moving to a data-centric design approach, where inputs are taken from a digital basis of design by automated analysis tools, and report generation is automated. These tools utilise our data management platform which eliminates manual data handling and transfer, thereby increasing efficiency. A good example of this is how our pipeline routing and subsea layouts are generated in the GIS space, meaning the full process, through to generation of drawings is automated.

[This story continues in the full magazine]