Research and innovation activities SIRIUS are organised into research programs and beacon projects. The research programs focus on technology components and research-based methods. The beacons are designed to take the results from SIRIUS’ research programs and show how they can create innovation in our partner companies. Each beacon addresses a pressing need in an industry and seeks to meet this through prototyping and piloting of SIRIUS’ research results. If you are interested in joining a SIRIUS research program for a master's thesis please see our list of master's topics or contact the research program leader.
Beacon Projects
SIRIUS’ innovation work is organized into beacon projects. Our idea is to identify broad but distinct areas where scalable data access could benefit industry and broader society.
SIRIUS’ beacon projects span the boundaries between computer science academics, information technology vendors and applications in oil & gas, medicine and environmental applications. They are designed to take the results from SIRIUS’ research programs and show how they can create innovation and changed business models in our partner companies. Each beacon addresses a pressing need in an industry and seeks to meet this through prototyping and piloting of SIRIUS’ research results.
Geological Assistant
The Geological Assistant is a SIRIUS innovation project between university researchers, Equinor, and Schlumberger.
The project’s goal is to develop a tool-supported method for exploration geologists to better assess and evaluate exploration prospects by applying established techniques from knowledge representation and formal methods from software verification. The project includes researchers from the University of Oslo and NTNU with expertise ranging from implementation and use of digital technologies, knowledge representation, formal methods, and naturally, geology.
Contact: Adnan Latif
Subsurface Data Access and Analytics
SIRIUS is building on the Optique platform for ontology-based data access to demonstrate how repositories like DISKOS can be developed into digital platforms for exploration, research and innovation. Once this data is opened up, it needs to be analysed. For this reason we are also working with image analysis, data science and natural language applications in sub-surface data management.
Contact: Adnan Latif
Digital Field and Reservoir Management
Oil & gas fields are becoming more and more complex. Production facilities and reservoirs interact with each other. The quality and quantity of instrumentation is increasing, with down hole monitoring and multiphase metering. Companies are looking at implementing real-time reservoir control through building digital twins of the entire field. SIRIUS’ beacon project in digital field and reservoir project applies our skills in semantic technology, data science and scalable computing to improving how computers support modern field management and petroleum technology.
Contact: Adnan Latif
Integrated Digital Planning
SIRIUS Integrated Digital Planning beacon applies formal methods of analysis and simulation to planning problems in commissioning, supply-chain logistics and maintenance. The methods and approaches taken are applicable across most areas where complex industrial or operational procedures must be planned. This work is done in collaboration with Equinor. SAP and TechnipFMC are also now participating in this work.
Contact: Rudolf Schlatt
Digital Twins
The digital twin concept reached the top of Gartner Group’s well-known hype curve in 2018. “Everybody” is building a digital twin of their process, plant or product. Building sustainable and usable digital twins requires high-quality data science, knowledge representation. The alternative is an increased siloing of data. SIRIUS is working to implement a research program that will support the implementation of scalable digital twins. SIRIUS held a one-day workshop on Digital Twins in Oslo in March 2018. This brought together participants from Equinor, Petrobras, Schlumberger, Halliburton, DNV GL, Computas, OSISoft, Aker Solutions, Aibel, IBM and SAP. Participants shared their ideas of what a digital twin is and should be, and these form the basis of a SIRIUS research agenda.
SIRIUS is finding better ways of building and delivering systems that use operational data for decision support. One of the buzzwords of 2017 and 2018 was digital twins. SIRIUS partners OSIsoft, Computas and DNV GL are worked with the University of Oslo and University of Oxford on methodological projects related to accessing data efficiently and handing time-series data effectively for machine learning. Our ambition is to contribute to or coordinate EU and Norwegian projects in application of digital twins.
Contact: David Cameron
Digital Field Development
Field development is the process through which a discovered oil field is built so that it can produce oil and gas. This is a complex process, which goes through a so-called Capital Value Process, where investment decisions are made at decision gates. Much time and effort are devoted to tracking of a design and its requirements through the lifetime of a product, component or system. SIRIUS offers a standard and powerful way of digitalizing requirements and designs so that they can be managed and shared effectively. Preparatory work in 2017 has resulted in the commissioning of a large Joint Industry Project called READI, that is looking at demonstrating how requirements can be digitalized to reduce the cost and improve the performance of engineering, procurement and construction.
SIRIUS is implementing and standardizing better ways of managing requirements throughout the lifecycle of the facility. This work was realized in DNV GL’s DREAM project and the READI Joint Industry project. This work involves DNV GL, Equinor, Technip FMC, Aker Solutions and Aibel. This work builds on and develops SIRIUS tools and methods for Ontology Engineering.
Contact: Arild Waaler
Personalized Medicine
Personalized medicine is the practice of making medical decisions, tailoring medical interventions, and fitting the management of disease to a patient’s individual characteristics. Genetics plays a major role in this process and is used to help predict a patient’s response to treatment or risk of disease. SIRIUS works with the BigMed lighthouse project to apply our methods to personalized medicine. We are using this work to launch further projects that take SIRIUS methods and tools and apply them in a medical context.
Contact:Laura Slaughter
Environmental Applications
Scalable data access is a pressing problem for environmental monitoring and decision-making. Sensors and data sources provide large amounts of structured data, text, pictures and videos. These are spread across many databases and Excel spreadsheets. The environmental scientist has the same data access challenges as an oil & gas engineer. For this reason we are working with leading environmental researchers like CIRFA and NIVA to solve data access and data science challenges.
Available Master's Theses
Publications
List of publications registered in Cristin (National Research Information System).
For an extended overview of publications and presentations, please check the Annual reports.