Constructive Simulation for the Oil and Gas Industry

Several people have asked about the application of constructive simulation for the Oil and Gas Industry.  As we have seen, safety and loss prevention are huge items that are at the top of everyone’s mind today, mainly due to the problems with BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  As previous blogs have discussed, constructive simulation has broad applicability to nearly any public safety scenarios – how can simulation be used as a tool for the Oil and Gas Industry?

Constructive Simulation is new to the Oil and Gas Industry.  Simulation and simulators of different types have been used for many years for a variety of uses, from production to reservoir visualization.  Constructive simulation is a different tool that has huge potential to change a number of facets of the energy industry, much the same as GIS technology has revolutionized how we record and present data.  Constructive Simulation brings a real-time, dynamic and visual tool into our tool bag that greatly improves the way we approach emergencies, safety and training.

Because we are talking about a new application of constructive simulation, let's review some of the basics.

What is Constructive Simulation?  Constructive simulation is a computer-based tool that allows one or more users to control a large number of “entities” within the simulation.  An entity can be a person, a vehicle or even a piece of equipment.  All of the entities interact within the simulation according to rules that are part of the simulation, itself.  Sounds complex?  Not really – once a scenario has been designed and built, much of this interaction is automatic and it occurs behind the scenes.  The people controlling the entities typically have simple on-screen menus to control their movement and interaction. 

I believe that Constructive Simulation could very successfully be applied in the following situations:

• Digital Safety Training Briefings
• Emergency Response Plan Preparation 
• Emergency Response Plan Validation
• Integration with Existing GIS Products
• Incident Command Training
• Replacement or augmentation of tabletop exercises

I will discuss each of these applications in turn, but for today, I will cover just the first one.

Digital Safety Training Briefings

The aim of a safety briefing is for people to understand their role during an emergency so that they will know what to do and instinctively do it.  If people have to understand what to do during a dynamic situation, why use static tools like a Word document or PowerPoint?  Let’s face it – people often have a hard time reading a static document and then applying what they learned in real-life.  Why not use a dynamic, visual tool that will show people in real-time what they are supposed to do? 

The airplane safety videos do a good job of showing a dynamic safety briefing – Constructive Simulation can do the same thing for the energy industry, except on a much larger scale and with a greater degree of complexity.   Imagine being able to conduct a safety briefing using a dynamic tool that allowed you to walk a group of trainees through a complex event with a simple-to-understand and visual tool.  Imagine being able to show the trainees what they needed to do – from any perspective, fully controllable in real-time.  All of this is possible with a good constructive simulation. Imagine being able to re-run the scenario quickly and easily, showing different possibilities and contingencies.

Why not extend the capabilities of the safety briefing?  You could create your own constructive simulation-based safety videos that can be placed on your web site that would be playable by anyone.  Workers could use these briefing videos to improve their safety knowledge before being assigned to a new area and the energy company could monitor access to ensure that employees watched the video as part of their safety indoctrination.

If you use your imagination you can quickly see that Constructive Simulation has the potential to greatly improve safety briefings - even to the point of holding a small simulation exercise at the end of the briefing to ensure that the employees (managing their own "entities") can confidently and successfully do what they are supposed to do in an emergency.  Imagine being able to play the safety briefing/exercise with any type of emergency and switch to new emergencies in a couple of minutes to give the trainees a realistic training indoctrination in multiple environments.  Imagine the knowledge that the employees could have by DOING instead of just reading or listening.

In the next blog I will tackle the subject of emergency response plans.

Keep training!

Bruce