Exploration and Production (E&P) of oil/gas involve economically valuable but
complex tasks. They comprise workflows with pipelined processes and interrelated
disciplines (e.g. Geophysics, Geology, Reservoir and Production
Engineering, Business and Economic Analysis) throughout the E&P life cycle of
Exploration, Appraisal, Development and Production. In this cycle, large amounts
of multi-modal data are generated presenting various levels of inaccuracies,
sparseness, scale, dimensions and uncertainty.
Creating software applications that ensure users to gain insightful and actionable
information from such vast amounts of complex oil/gas E&P datasets is a
challenging problem. Visual Computing technology (Interactive Modeling,
Visualization and Analytics) plays a critical role in such applications. The
fundamental goal is to present, transform and convert data into an efficient and
effective visual representation that users can rapidly, intuitively and easily model,
explore, understand, and analyze. As a result, data is transformed into information
and then into knowledge.
Today, visual computing in oil/gas E&P faces great challenges due to the
intersection of advances in several fields (e.g. Scientific & Information
Visualization, Applied Mathematics, Visual Analytics, Computer Graphics, High-
Performance Computing, Human-Computer Interaction) with requirements for
novel reservoir modeling, visualization and analytics software tools and
technology, E&P data and application integration, and multi-disciplinary
collaborative decision-making.
In this presentation I will discuss and motivate fundamental and applied R&D
being conducted in my research group on key issues about these challenges and
the requirements for novel visual computing solutions throughout the E&P cycle. I
will bring specific examples from our projects with the oil/gas industry within
three key project themes: (1) modeling, data management and knowledge
representation; (2) data visualization and analytics techniques and approaches;
(3) interaction techniques and technology. These themes have been identified in
conjunction with our industry partners and collaborators from the oil/gas
industry as necessary to solve targeted current and future problems on a short,
medium and long-term basis.
