Reality Capture and Visualisation of 3D Oil & Gas Facility Data for Operations and Decommissioning

Accurate and reliable data is fundamental for the management of Oil & Gas facilities throughout their lifecycle. Several standards and specifications have been proposed throughout the years to support information management in the Oil & Gas industry. Standards such as ISO 15926 and specifications such as Capital Facilities Information Handover Specification (CFIHOS) are slowly being adopted by the Oil & Gas industry in new build projects. However, for existing facilities in the Operations and Decommissioning stages, information is frequently of poor quality. This study proposes the visualisation of 3D Oil & Gas asset data, including documentation data from several databases based on CFIHOS templates, in order to support the planning of Operations and Decommissioning tasks. We propose the use of game engines for the visualisation of the data-enriched 3D models. The proposed method supports the input of 3D data from reality capture methods, as well as existing design and as-built facility models. The proposed method was tested in a case study of an existing Normally Unmanned Installation (NUI) using data from a laser scanning survey as an input. Several limitations were highlighted and future developments have been identified, including the deployment of the virtual environment on mobile platforms.