Our Beacons

SIRIUS’ innovation work is organized into beacon programmes. Our idea is to identify broad but distinct areas where scalable data access could benefit industry and broader society.

Our scoping work in 2016 and 2017 showed that there were many ideas for how and where SIRIUS could work. We sorted and prioritized these ideas to find those that both had the best links to our research and skills and solved our partner’s industrial problems. Each beacon addresses a pressing need in an industry and seeks to meet this through prototyping and piloting of SIRIUS’ research results.

  • Digital assistant
  • Subsurface data access & analytics
  • oil rig production platforms at sea
  • Four ships moored in Aberdeen harbour as the sun sets.
  • Chemical plant at night, Wloclawek, Poland
  • Digital FIeld Development
  • Personalized Medicine
  • A scientist monitoring water quality from a solar powered field laboratory

Geological Assistant

The Geological Assistant is a SIRIUS innovation project between university researchers, Equinor, and Schlumberger. The project’s goal is to develop a tool-supported method for exploration geologists to better assess and evaluate exploration prospects by applying established techniques from knowledge representation and formal methods from software verification.

Subsurface Data Access and Analytics

SIRIUS is building on the Optique platform for ontology-based data access to demonstrate how repositories like DISKOS can be developed into digital platforms for exploration, research and innovation. Once this data is opened up, it needs to be analysed. For this reason, we are also working with image analysis, data science and natural language applications in sub-surface data management. 

Digital Field and Reservoir Management

Oil & gas fields are becoming more and more complex. Production facilities and reservoirs interact with each other. The quality and quantity of instrumentation is increasing, with down hole monitoring and multiphase metering. Companies are looking at implementing real-time reservoir control through building digital twins of the entire field. In 2017 this beacon consisted solely of a collaborative project that focused on improving the performance of open reservoir simulators on high-performance computers. This work has continued in 2018. In addition, we have also seen that data science and digital twins are of interest in field management and petroleum technology. We have therefore worked with Equinor, Petrobras and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) to define an ambitious program that will define research-based best practices for implementing digital twins for field management.

Integrated Digital Planning

SIRIUS’ planning beacon has started by developing a case study that looks at vessel movements and cargo transport in the North Sea. The goal is to improve the workflow of planners at Equinor by providing a better overview of the bottlenecks that could delay overall progress, the load on different vessels, and the quality of their logistics operations.

Digital Twins

The digital twin concept reached the top of Gartner Group’s well-known hype curve in 2018. “Everybody” is building a digital twin of their process, plant or product. Building sustainable and usable digital twins requires high-quality data science, knowledge representation. The alternative is an increased siloing of data. SIRIUS is working to implement a research program that will support the implementation of scalable digital twins. SIRIUS held a one-day workshop on Digital Twins in Oslo in March 2018. This brought together participants from Equinor, Petrobras, Schlumberger, Halliburton, DNV GL, Computas, OSISoft, Aker Solutions, Aibel, IBM and SAP. Participants shared their ideas of what a digital twin is and should be, and these form the basis of a SIRIUS research agenda.

Digital Field Development

Field development is the process through which a discovered oil field is built so that it can produce oil and gas. This is a complex process, which goes through a so-called Capital Value Process, where investment decisions are made at decision gates. Much time and effort are devoted to tracking of a design and its requirements through the lifetime of a product, component or system. SIRIUS offers a standard and powerful way of digitalizing requirements and designs so that they can be managed and shared effectively. Preparatory work in 2017 has resulted in the commissioning of a large Joint Industry Project called READI, that is looking at demonstrating how requirements can be digitalized to reduce the cost and improve the performance of engineering, procurement and construction.

Personalized Medicine

Personalized medicine is the practice of making medical decisions, tailoring medical interventions, and fitting the management of disease to a patient’s individual characteristics. Genetics plays a major role in this process and is used to help predict a patient’s response to treatment or risk of disease. SIRIUS works with the BigMed lighthouse project to apply our methods to personalized medicine. We are using this work to launch further projects that take SIRIUS methods and tools and apply them in a medical context.

Environmental Applications

Scalable data access is a pressing problem for environmental monitoring and decision-making. Sensors and data sources provide large amounts of structured data, text, pictures and videos. These are spread across many databases and Excel spreadsheets. The environmental scientist has the same data access challenges as an oil & gas engineer. For this reason we are working with leading environmental researchers like CIRFA and NIVA to solve data access and data science challenges.