No abstract

TX 75083-3836, U.S.A., fax 01-972-952-9435. AbstractThe oil and gas industry need to improve operational efficiency, and to address more demanding government issued requirements with respect to environmental safety in vulnerable areas such as the artic north. These requirements drive for new IT solutions, solutions not possible to implement using the more traditional approaches to software development.These new solutions must be able to sense the environment, make decisions without human intervention, and involve humans when needed. In the latter situation the software can be used to prioritize problems that need human attention and assist the human in making better decisions with respect to the available information and situation at hand.

A major trend in the oil and gas industry in the recent years have gone towards moving installations from the surface to the seabed utilizing existing surface based facilities or by developing new onshore facilities. Enabling this trend is an increased instrumentation of the equipment, down-hole and on the seabed. Increased instrumentation results in more data that has to be processed by human operators. Research shows that human operator information overload leads to poor decision making. To avoid information overload, we need a new breed of system where more of the information processing and decision making can be handled by computers.Over the last couple of years we have worked extensively with autonomous systems. We see autonomy as a vital property in this new breed of systems, where we have identified three scenarios that can benefit. These are:• Production and process optimization • Environmental monitoring and control • Equipment condition monitoringThe key elements of our approach are a combination of the distributed data processing capabilities of software agents with a variable autonomy approach to the interaction with the human operator. Variable autonomy enables a human operator to defer control to a system when the system state is within a given envelope. The system will escalate decision making to the human operator when it reaches its decision making boundary.The goal of our work is to make the human operator more capable of handling critical situations and prevent unwanted incidents by transforming the stream of data into information and proposed actions. The work will be focused around the transformation of data into decisions and the interaction between the human operator and the computer system.

A major trend in the oil and gas industry in the recent years have gone towards moving installations from the surface to the seabed utilizing existing surface based facilities or by developing new onshore facilities. Enabling this trend is an increased instrumentation of the equipment, down-hole and on the seabed. Increased instrumentation results in more data that has to be processed by human operators. Research shows that human operator information overload leads to poor decision making. To avoid information overload, we need a new breed of system where more of the information processing and decision making can be handled by computers.Over the last couple of years we have worked extensively with autonomous systems. We see autonomy as a vital property in this new breed of systems, where we have identified three scenarios that can benefit. These are:• Production and process optimization • Environmental monitoring and control • Equipment condition monitoringThe key elements of our approach are a combination of the distributed data processing capabilities of software agents with a variable autonomy approach to the interaction with the human operator. Variable autonomy enables a human operator to defer control to a system when the system state is within a given envelope. The system will escalate decision making to the human operator when it reaches its decision making boundary.The goal of our work is to make the human operator more capable of handling critical situations and prevent unwanted incidents by transforming the stream of data into information and proposed actions. The work will be focused around the transformation of data into decisions and the interaction between the human operator and the computer system.

TX 75083-3836, U.S.A., fax 01-972-952-9435. AbstractThe oil and gas industry need to improve operational efficiency, and to address more demanding government issued requirements with respect to environmental safety in vulnerable areas such as the artic north. These requirements drive for new IT solutions, solutions not possible to implement using the more traditional approaches to software development.These new solutions must be able to sense the environment, make decisions without human intervention, and involve humans when needed. In the latter situation the software can be used to prioritize problems that need human attention and assist the human in making better decisions with respect to the available information and situation at hand.