Automated Guidelines and Standards Compliance Checking in Oil and Gas Industry

One of the important concerns in the oil and gas industry, as in many other fields, is making sure that work processes comply with the industry-specific regulations, guidelines and standards. These standards cover a plethora of requirements, from managing equipment and people, to conducting work processes that minimally impact the environment and ecosystems. For Canada, these guidelines are different among provinces. For example, Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board (CNLOPB) and Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board (CNSOPB) are regulatory bodies for Atlantic Canada. Traditionally, during a project planning a domain expert would manually examine provincial and general regulations and create work procedures that comply with them. This is a long and labourious process. With the advent of modern Natural Language Processing techniques, it is possible to use computer systems to support automated regulatory compliance. This functionality is highly desired in many industries and has become increasingly common. A challenging problem is the conversion of standards and guidelines designed for humans into computer readable code. We propose a system that consists of two key parts: (a) text-to-ontology transformer and (b) compliance checker. Standard-to-ontology converter is a model that uses NLP TO BE CONT’

Faculty Supervisor:

Vlado Keselj

Student:

Dijana Kosmajac

Partner:

Waterford Energy Services Inc

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Construction and infrastructure

University:

Dalhousie University