Oil & Gas (O&G) offshore platforms are accounted as industrial “towns”, ranked among the most hazardous working environments. Emergency situations in such environments are highly unpredictable and characterized by pressure of time, ambiguous facts on disaster escalation and rapidly changing conditions. OffshoreMuster system brings together the latest technological advancements in real-time personnel tracking and electronic mustering, complementing the existing Health, Safety and Environment (H&S) procedures, by enabling situation awareness over personnel location and status which is a key factor supporting better decision-making towards zero casualty in emergency situations.
The system’s underlying technology, developed after years of dedicated research and development efforts, consists of specialised low-power wireless wearable devices, customised gateways and a secure backbone network infrastructure feeding a modular intelligent decision support software system with real-time streams of data for processing and visualisation of information relevant to personnel situation assessment.
Lightweight ubiquitous devices in the form of a bracelet or embedded in the uniform are assigned to People on Board (PoB) and periodically transmit real-time location and status awareness data. A network of dedicated gateways, which are placed at specific locations on the offshore O&G asset, connected through the infrastructure’s ethernet, relay data to a central decision support system. Specialised localisation algorithms and data analytics tools, process the data to estimate the personnel positions and PoB status information, interactively visualising in real-time location awareness, incident escalation and alerting, which can significantly reduce response time and speed up a safe evacuation procedure.
OffshoreMuster system can be adjusted to standard O&G H&S processes, as they have been adapted by a client, allowing additional computer-aided decision support features, like the real-time observation of the fire-fighting team response status, the concentration of people in specific areas, restricted areas monitoring, instant alerting or the last-known position of a missing person.
Computer-aided decision support combined with ultra-low power autonomous IoT technologies systems play a significant role in controlling, managing, and preventing critical incidents in harsh working environments, contributing into minimisation of accidents occurrence in O&G environments. OffshoreMuster system has been validated in full-scale deployment on an actual O&G asset emulating real drills.
