Brownfield Knowledge, Walking Out the Door
Offshore oil and gas is in a decade of decommissioning, with hundreds of assets due to cease production over the next decade. 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 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 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.