Dynamic web3d visualisation of oil & gas facility assets

Efficient information management in the oil and gas industry is crucial to provide all of the data flows, required to support the business and safe operation of facilities. The cost of creating digital facility asset data sets increases, if it is performed late in the delivery process, as it becomes increasingly difficult and expensive to retrieve missing information. There is a need to develop approaches and tools for the management of such data sets throughout the whole project lifecycle. This includes the harvesting of heterogeneous data from disparate applications, its integration, sharing and use across the project phases. This paper is part of a large industrial research project, aimed to create an efficient engineering information integration framework. This framework will create a single, accessible and trusted data source, combining operational equipment data and its 3D representation. Previous papers published by the authors have presented the overall framework and the proposed technology to deliver the operational asset data. This paper focuses on linking that data to the 3D model elements, harvested from design applications, and delivering configurable and dynamic 3D scenes to the client’s web browser. Performance benchmarks show the usability of the implemented Web3D prototype, based on WebGL, in a project environment.