Improving acquisition efficiency with a situational awareness (SA) based SIMOPS management solution

Abstract

Situational awareness (SA) describes the accuracy of a person's knowledge and understanding of a situation. It directly impacts the quality of decisions made by personnel. SA can be severely compromised when personnel are overloaded with complex and dynamic information, as experienced during simultaneous operations (SIMOPS) management in many offshore fields. When conducting seismic acquisition, poor SA can result in an increase in risk exposure, inefficiency and expense. This paper presents a SIMOPS management system which works to improve the SA of all users (including, but not limited to seismic operations personnel), therefore improving the efficiency and reducing the risk exposure of acquisition. This is primarily achieved through a linked Gantt chart and map, and the ability to model forward in time, showing the users where vessels and other infield equipment (such as streamers, dive crews, drilling rigs etc.) plan to be in the future. A knowledge-based system automatically provides alarms when rules are breached, reducing the chance of user error and increasing visibility. Several case histories from commercial field operations have demonstrated that downtime and risk exposure can be reduced through effective SA.