A Web3D Enabled Information Integration Framework for Facility Management

Managing capital oil and gas and civil engineering facilities requires a large amount of heterogeneous information that is generated by different project stakeholders across the facility lifecycle phases and is stored in various databases and technical documents. The amount of information reaches its peak during the commissioning and handover phases when the project is handed over to the operator. The operational phase of facilities spans multiple decades and the way facilities are used and maintained have a huge impact on costs, environment, productivity, and health and safety. Thus, the client and the operator bear most of the additional costs associated with incomplete, incorrect or not immediately usable information. Web applications can provide quick and convenient access to information regardless of user location. However, the integration and delivery of engineering information, including 3D content, over the Web is still at its infancy and is affected by numerous technical (i.e. data and tools) and procedural (i.e. process and people) challenges. This paper addresses the technical issues and proposes a Web3D enabled information integration framework that delivers engineering information together with 3D content without any plug-ins. In the proposed framework, a class library defines the engineering data requirements and a semi-structured database provides means to integrate heterogeneous technical asset information. This framework also enables separating the 3D model content into fragments, storing them together with the digital assets and delivering to the client browser on demand. Such framework partially alleviates the current limitations of the JavaScript based 3D content delivery such as application speed and latency. Hence, the proposed framework is particularly valuable to petroleum and civil engineering companies working with large amounts of data.