Brownfield Knowledge, Walking Out the Door
The UK Continental Shelf is in a decade of decommissioning: the regulator puts the remaining bill above £40 billion, with well over a hundred assets due to cease production before 2031. The people who commissioned those assets are retiring, and the technicians maintaining them work from fragmented, often paper-based drawings and manuals.
Steel.vision captures that expertise where it is used. The app recognises vessels, pumps and valves in the camera view, reads tags and nameplates, traces lines on a photographed P&ID, and answers questions from the manuals loaded on the phone, citing the page. Everything runs on the device.
Shutdowns, Isolations and Permit-to-Work
Shutdowns and isolations are where drawings meet reality. Delays come from finding the right valve, reading a dense P&ID on a windy deck, and confirming isolation boundaries under a permit to work.
Steel.vision lets the team verify an isolation boundary against the drawing in the field: identify the asset, trace the connecting line on the P&ID, and log what was seen. It is advisory and cited—it supports the authorised person, it does not replace the permit.
North Sea Specifics
- Hazardous areas: a stock phone is not certified for DSEAR-zoned process areas. Pilots start in safe areas, control rooms and onshore decommissioning yards; ATEX/IECEx Zone 2 iPhone enclosures are available for zoned work.
- Drawing standards: the tracer reads ISO 10628 process symbols and ISA-5.1 tags, so UK and legacy drawings work without conversion.
- Offline by design: no connectivity is needed on the platform, the terminal or the vessel; nothing is uploaded, which matters on assets that are operators of essential services.
- Visual Diagnostics: Cross-reference real-time visual degradation (like severe pipeline corrosion or leaks) against integrated technical manuals instantly via edge multimodal AI.
Safety Comes From the Citation
Misidentifying a high-pressure line is the classic brownfield error. Steel.vision anchors each answer to a visual overlay and a manual page the technician can open, and it refuses when the manual has no entry, so procedural drift is caught by the citation rather than by luck.