Streamlining Digital Modeling and Building Information Modelling (BIM) Uses for the Oil and Gas Projects

The oil and gas industry is a technology-driven industry. Over the last two decades, it has heavily made use of digital modeling and associated technologies (DMAT) to enhance its commercial capability. Meanwhile, the Building Information Modelling (BIM) has grown at an exponential rate in the built environment sector. It is not only a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility, but it has also made an impact on the management processes of building project lifecycle. It is apparent that there are many similarities between BIM and DMAT usability in the aspect of physical modeling and functionality. The aim of this study is to streamline the usage of both DMAT and BIM whilst discovering valuable practices for performance improvement in the oil and gas projects. To achieve this, 28 BIM guidelines, 83 DMAT academic publications and 101 DMAT vendor case studies were selected for review. The findings uncover (a) 38 BIM uses; (b) 32 DMAT uses and; (c) 36 both DMAT and BIM uses. The synergy between DMAT and BIM uses would render insightful references into managing efficient oil and gas’s projects. It also helps project stakeholders to recognise future investment or potential development areas of BIM and DMAT uses in their projects

A Case Study in Pipeline Processor Farming: Parallelising the H.263 Encoder

This paper describes the parallelisation of the H.263 hybrid video encoder algorithm based upon a pipelines of processor farms (PPF) paradigm. In addition, a data-farming template, which can be very useful for several image coding algorithms, was incorporated in the PPF model. A variety of parallel topologies were implemented in order to obtain the best time performance for an eight processor distributed-memory machine. Results show that, due to communication overheads and algorithm constraints, the speed-up performance is below the value predicted by static analysis. However, the design examples indicated how to modify the PPF methodology in identifying those algorithm components which restrict scaling performance. The paper highlights the problems associated with the parallelisation of sequential algorithms and emphasises the need for generic tools to facilitate such conversion. 1 Introduction H.263 is a new standard for very low bit-rate videocoding (!64kbps) which is ..

Designing and Instrumenting a Software Template for Embedded Parallel Systems

This paper considers the design of a reusable software template for a parallel data-farm which uses demand-based load-balancing. A feature of the farm is integral instrumentation. A design example is given for a hybrid processor message-passing machine (the Paramid) in which monitoring is accomplished by an instrumented interface program. Other aspects of the design are use of buffering to mask communication latency, an asynchronous multicast provision, and a controlled interface to the worker functions. Trace material is discussed from two examples when the template design was used to monitor real-time, continuous-flow applications. Th