Rig Sense
Oil & Gas
Drill fast and safe
Drill fast and safe
Every minute that a oil rig is not drilling is a minute that it is not making money. This is called Non-Productive Time. NPT can occur for many reasons including safety incidents or equipment failure. But what about those moments where things could just move a little quicker, a process made a little more efficient, without sacrificing safety? This is the concept of Invisible Lost Time, one of the most elusive productivity targets in the oil and gas industry. If drilling companies had a way to turn invisible lost time into productive time, they could drill faster, accomplish jobs quicker and ultimately make more money.
The heart of the drilling platform, where workers make drill string connections many, many times per day. This is where Invisible Lost Time lurks.
An early wireframe, using a "player piano" interface to show how closely different workers were achieving best practices
The Drill Floor is the main location on the rig where invisible lost time can be reclaimed. It’s also one of the most dangerous places on a drilling platform to work. In order to understand why, it’s important to understand the basic drilling process.
Because this dangerous procedure occurs over and over and over again on a 12 hour shift, micro-moments of delay or deviation from best practices add up over time to cost hundreds or millions of dollars. It’s a death of a thousand papercuts.
Rig Sense uses computer vision to detect non-productive time on an oil rig drill floor. It watches for potential unsafe behavior and recommends best practices to coach workers. As a result, it promises to decrease cost through reduction in invisible lost time.
To create the vision for Rig Sense, I worked with a client expert whose doctoral thesis was on invisible lost time. We included a creative technologist to create a proof of concept for the computer vision component. Finally, I directed an Experience Designer to make the final screens and the prototype.
Creating different UI elements, cards, buttons and content buckets allowed me to shuffle layout elements without the distraction of pushing pixels. I used these paper sketches to create information hierarchy with the designer for this concept.
This technique also helped us think about the different states of the map the the executive could use to monitor the productivity and safety of individual oil rigs.
The Driller is the person on the drill floor who actually operates the motor that drives the drill into the sea floor. He raises and lowers the elevator that lifts and inserts pipe into the drill string. In this series of screens, our client envisioned that the driller could watch the drilling process in the same way that a person on a treadmill can see the next interval in their run. This gave my designer and I an experience to reference as we created the functionality for this feature.
The Drill Floor Supervisor monitors activity on the drilling floor for best practices and safety. In our prototype, he would use Rig Floor Watcher to highlight areas where the crew performed well, where they could improve and where there was a safety issue.
The VP of Operations is an onshore role. She remotely monitors the status of multiple drilling platforms. Her main concern is how much non-productive time is affecting the cost of the rig. With the Rig Floor Watcher dashboard, she can see the performance of the rigs and investigate the root cause for incidents like safety or work stoppage.
An overview of all the company's rigs in the area
VP can drill down to see the details of a single rig
VP can see the behavior and uptime of the rig
Safety incidents are recorded by multiple cameras for analysis. The Rig Sense AI determines what could have been the preferred actions.
An incident has occurred that requires the VP's attention
The safety incident, recorded from multiple angles
Computer vision recognizes each phase of the drilling process. It compares current work to best practices. It tracks invisible lost time due to deviation from best practice.
The root cause analysis tool. VP can scroll over the incident like a video editing program (e.g. After Effects)
The VP gets a regular report of the performance of each rig.
The root cause analysis tool is similar to a video editing timeline or a player piano. Computer vision recognizes each worker and what part of the tripping in or tripping out process they are performing. It can then compare their work to best practices and previously recorded best times from this crew. In doing so, Rig Sense can interpret whether the order of events is optimized or if there is a safety concern.
Rig Sense was well received by the board during our final innovation immersion session. The concept and the research that created it was retained as part of the client's portfolio of innovation.
