Oil and gas industries typically employ expensive specialists, often contractors, in a wide range of disciplines. Such specialists generate information of immense value to the wider organisation, but it is often obscured behind complex and expensive software tools or in proprietary database formats. Furthermore, the information of interest varies from entire documents to individual values from a spreadsheet. Information is also time-dependent to varying degrees: from relatively static data such as employee details in an Oracle database, to real-time information from a DCS.
The nature of the internet addresses many, but not all, of these barriers to information dissemination. Given the bandwidth of a typical corporate intranet, worldwide distribution is no longer an issue, and ease-of-use is not an issue as almost everybody uses a browser at home and at work. However, real-time data is not easily supported, and without custom interfaces information can still remain locked in proprietary systems.
Many organisations have taken the strengths of the web and made impressive inroads into flattening information hierarchies. Albeit in a sometimes adhoc manner, various databases are exposed via custom applications, and bodies of documentation are migrated to suitable formats and locations.
Advanced products such as ePlant, from Industrial Software Solutions, extend this capability by adding real-time data to the web page. ePlant users can see and chart live, updating values from proprietary data historians such as Honeywell's PHD or OSI Software's PI. Even laboratory information systems or production planning systems may be treated as live data sources. To give a practical example, the monthly planned production value from the production-planning database can be shown alongside the current integrated flow rate from the real-time historian. This information is dragged and dropped onto a web page and is instantly available across the entire organisation.
Products such as ePlant coexist with a standard web server to provide a central point of access to all primary sources of data in an organisation. For example, selecting an option from a live tag's drop-down menu can transparently run a keyword-search from a document-management system such as Documentum. Another selection may queue a request to an equipment-maintenance application. So here we see the web server transparently acting as a front end for a variety of applications and hiding the complexity of the native interfaces. Whilst power users still need the full feature-set of the native interface, such a strategy opens complex applications and islands of information to the wider community who only need access to a small subset of the resultant data
The key philosophy behind this kind of architecture is the concentration of all the complexity on the web server which then acts as a single point of access to a large number of data sources and applications. Database usernames and passwords can all be maintained centrally rather than scribbled on post-it notes around the organisation every time they change. Operating procedures hidden in deep directory hierarchies and obscure file-naming conventions can be read by clicking on a hyperlink. As a bonus, modern web server and browser software ensures that intranet users can be invisibly authenticated using their domain names, thus preserving existing Win NT/ Windows 2000 security schemes without incurring frequent, annoying login prompts.
A side-effect of this strategy is a better utilisation of IT resources by avoidance of "data movement" exercises - those applications which simply move data from one place to another so that it can be viewed by a particular group of users. If the web server can see it, you don't have to move it. It also eliminates "losing-my-application" politics, where a lovingly handcrafted application is taken over by the IT department when it reaches a certain size or importance to the organisation.
Grouping diverse static and real-time information by visual proximity
On the face of it, exposing an organisation's true wealth of information to the entire employee body would seem to run the risk of deluging individuals with information. However, when information is sufficiently fine-grained, selected elements from various datasources can be grouped by simply placing them next to each other on a web page. Rapid navigation from site overview to fine detail can be accomplished via a series of pages logically linked in a hierarchical fashion.
A typical example is a web page displaying a process schematic. Placed over and around a given piece of equipment are various live values from the control system, the latest lab analysis results, and links to current operating procedures and the maintenance system. This is a vast improvement on staggering around a control room with an armful of A3 manuals while trying to call helpdesk to get the new lab system password.
Grouping by proximity provides innate prioritisation and context. Without being told, a glance at such a display tells us that "This stuff is important in this space. If I'm interested in one of these values or documents, I'm probably interested in the others".
Flexibility is the other key point. While we can group related documents on a file server, we can't put the current value of a flow meter there, or the tabulated results of a time-sensitive SQL query. Yet on an ePlant web page we can arrange these things on top of a process flow diagram that gives them inherent context, and they will update in real-time. The key point here is that by decoupling information from the implementation medium we can take advantage of the natural human preference for visual arrangement of information. With the complementary strategy of exposing the entirety of an organisations data via a web server, this will enable organisations to take their existing wealth of information for granted, and then build upon it.
Author: Mike Wiese (B Eng), is the Product Development Manager for Industrial Software Solutions. Mr Wiese has spent 12 years in SCADA systems development and real time data visualisation in Europe, the Middle East and Australia.
