Australian oil and gas operator Woodside has turned to SmartPlant Fusion, a new solution developed by Intergraph to specifically tackle the challenges of managing unstructured information. 

SmartPlant Fusion is designed to rapidly capture, organize, and make large volumes of previously unstructured information available through a simple web portal interface in a highly organized and intuitive manner. The types of unstructured information include documents, drawings, lists and sheets, 3D models, and even laser scan images and high-resolution photography. 

Woodside is the largest operator of oil and gas production in Australia.Woodside's operated facilities include six liquefied natural gas (LNG) trains, five offshore platforms (one under construction), and four oil floating, production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessels.

The Ngujima-Yin FPSO (pictured above) is currently moored 50 kilometers off the Western Australian coast. Ngujima-Yin is 333 meters long and the largest FPSO in Australian waters. The vessel operates at a depth of 350 meters and has a daily production capacity of 120,000 barrels of oil.

Intergraph was engaged by Woodside to help prepare the engineering scope for execution. The engineering information for Ngujima-Yin was found in multiple data sources, including several international locations. Data and documents were inconsistent and in different formats as they were managed differently at each location. 

There were also multiple versions of drawings and documents, and without a single set of masters, it was difficult to determine the latest and most accurate versions. To bridge this gap and move forward with the safe and effective operation of Ngujima-Yin, an accurate 'as-is' status of the FPSO was required.

Intergraph has released SmartPlant Fusion to specifically tackle the challenges faced by plant operators and engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) companies in accessing, organizing and managing unstructured legacy engineering information of an operating plant.

Concurrent engineering projects, turnarounds, equipment changes and even plant acquisitions flood operators with information in multiple formats, often distributed around the organization, potentially duplicated and inaccessible to support critical decisions.

SmartPlant Fusion “crawls” through all these information formats and locations, automatically reads and extracts meaningful content and assembles a highly organized plant record that can be simply navigated via an intuitive photo-realistic web portal. This “as-is” repository can be purged of duplicates, thus highlighting the true master information. Inconsistent tag naming and numbering, often the result of different engineering projects, can be “aliased” and harmonized.

SmartPlant Fusion captures High Definition Surveying (HDS) – combined laser scan point clouds and digital photography – and integrates it with the “as-is” documentation to present a digital and physical record of the “as-exists” plant. This can be used for maintenance and safety planning, remote engineering design using integrated point cloud and 3D, as well as operating configuration capture where the true “as-built” state of the plant is demanded.

SmartPlant Fusion automatically reads the loaded information as it incorporates many industry standards (such as databases) and new technologies. For the Ngujima-Yin FPSO project for Woodside, over 360,000 documents (at about 1,000 documents per hour) were loaded into SmartPlant Fusion as a single source of information, with cross-referenced links to the original files. The Intergraph solution creates associations using unique alias pattern matching, such as tag-to-document relationships, even when the tag name may not be perfect. Woodside could then navigate and view the documents via a web portal interface, as well as to analyse the information to determine the set of master versions.

SmartPlant Fusion helps to improve analysis time as it enables the engineer to quickly search on a document and view every version before making an assessment. It also allows multiple users to work within the single master data source, eliminating errors from duplication or working on outdated versions. SmartPlant Fusion contains an integral web-based portal, providing project personnel remote access to live data during the project phase, an important requirement for major projects. It is set up with Woodside's workflow processes to enable documentation approval and acceptance.

Woodside could also execute field-based data capture using SmartPlant Fusion. The collection of accurate, as-built data is highly important for an existing brownfield asset. This would normally be a tedious and potentially dangerous process as the engineer would have to physically inspect the facility and collect such data. However, as SmartPlant Fusion can capture and organize high-definition surveying information, Woodside could use Leica Geosystems laser scanners to provide an accurate 'as-exists' view of the Ngujima-Yin FPSO. Woodside can then compare the 'as-exists' view with the 'as-is' engineering information to record the FPSO's 'as-built' status accurately. SmartPlant Fusion reduces the amount of time required on-site, which helps to reduce costs and improve personnel safety.

Patrick Holcomb, Intergraph Process, Power & Marine’s executive vice president of Global Business Development and Marketing, said, “SmartPlant Fusion marks Intergraph’s first foray into brownfield legacy information acquisition and also extends our information management capabilities for greenfield projects. This new solution leverages technology from Intergraph’s SmartPlant Foundation and Leica Geosystems’ TruView™ Integrator for SmartPlant Enterpriseto provide owner operators with a unique direct comparison between the ‘as-is’ information and ‘as-exists’ condition of a plant. It provides a quick and easy starting point of the evolution of unstructured content, enabling owner operators and engineers to extract tremendous value from legacy information, and allowing them to verify the operating configuration of the plant, at a much lower cost than ever before possible.”

For more information about SmartPlant Fusion, visit www.intergraph.com/go/fusion/.