SIRIUS has just been through a comprehensive evaluation by an international expert panel and the Norwegian Research Council. Although the official report will come in the fall, we have received very positive feedback which recognizes excellence in research and relevance of our research to industrial partners.
Working with partners to build understanding
It is hard to link research to industrial challenges. We need to build community and bridge gaps in understanding and motivation. SIRIUS has worked at this in two novel ways. We have run a professional mentor program, which brings together senior managers from industry to mentor PhD candidates and post-doctoral researchers. We also use a new tool, the Industry Partnership Canvas, to define and evaluate our collaboration with every company in the centre.
A geological assistant
SIRIUS collaborates with Schlumberger and Equinor to use logic and formal methods to help geologists in their work by trying to capture their patterns of reasoning.
The project is interdisciplinary, building on expert geological knowledge. For this reason, we are working with a team from the Department of Geosciences, led by Michael Heeremans. The SIRIUS project team travelled to Spain in 2018 to experience first-hand how geologists work in the field.
READI: Digitalization of requirements
Building an oil platform is a complex task. Each piece of equipment among the thousands of components in a platform must meet a detailed set of requirements. These requirements ensure that the platform is safe and will do what it is designed to do.
At present, requirements are managed using documents, typically as PDF. READI, a joint industry project managed by DNV GL and financed by several oil and engineering companies, is now introducing new ways to digitalize requirements.
This can revolutionize how we manage and run complex capital projects. Methods developed by SIRIUS are at the core of READI and hence drive innovation in the industry.
Centre director: Professor Arild Waaler
Deputy director: Associate Professor Ingrid Chieh Yu
Centre coordinator: Dr. David Cameron