IBTIKAR Digital Lab - A Collaborative Approach towards Research and Development Challenges in Oil and Gas Upstream
Authors: Iqbal Rauf , Kumar Pranav , Aamir Muhammad , Al-Naqbi Shaikha Obaid , Jan Salahuddin Abdullah , Kumar Pravin , Mukherjee Jagannath 
Published: October 2022

There are various ideas in everyone's mind. But to convert the ideas into reality, requires initiative and action. Petroleum industry has been using different techniques, science and algorithms over the years to tackle the challenges in order to achieve a business objective. This paper shares the implemented approach to support business challenges by developing a Research and development environment to support the business community. The idea was to find out current business user challenges and support their requirements. IBTIKAR (innovation) lab is the result of this idea which is created to provide required In-House infrastructure (Hardware and Software) support within UAE National Oil Company premises.

Research and development are integral part of any company/industry for tackling challenges. Accessing various data types and implementing the concept of Big data has been of a great value. Collaboration between business users, Information technology and Data Management is required to have concrete foundation and to prepare roadmap for the future.

The application portfolio in an Oil and Gas upstream varies a lot and now a days, almost all the applications /tool come with a programming interface for integrating Open-Source algorithms. It makes it easier to directly connect the open-source tools to existing applications. The type of data types in upstream varies a lot and since these applications are already developed over the years to handle different kind of data, which further makes data analysis tasks achievable in timely manner. The available algorithms in existing tools and those accessed visa Open-source tools are further used for prediction and classification problems. With the advances in the learning algorithms, the modelling has become easier, and it requires very less coding. The challenges are more towards infrastructure support, as the data types and data size has gradually increased. Machine learning and Deep learning requires High end infrastructure to perform the data science using more CPU's, High End GPU's.

In order to adapt to the advancing science and technologies, it makes everyone responsible to learn and implement the data science and Artificial intelligence (AI) concepts in daily tasks and projects to support organization strategy and objectives. In order to get the business community ready for AI, availability of Data science tools and infrastructure is required. This will support and allow the business users of any kind of data to try and test various data types using AI and data science.

Following approach was taken from the idea initiation to the execution phase: Discussion with Business users to find out current business challenges and impediments in overcoming those challengesDocument project scopes for the discussed business challenges.Discussion with the respective Infrastructure support team to provide the Hardware and software support along with the required data storage space.Secure budget for developing IBTIKAR labDevelop environment for the research and development of various data science projectsIntegration of Open Source and Free software/s with the existing tools and applicationsAgree and support of the respective roles and responsibilitiesAgree of establishing a collaborative environment between business users, Information technology and data management engineers.To have tools covering the life cycle of the machine learning model (from creation to deployment to monitoring)

The business users involved throughout the upstream activities, want to use available open-source algorithms and run various Proof of concepts. In order to get value out of data and to extract insight, it is must that business users are empowered with the required infrastructure, trainings, data science tools and Artificial intelligent algorithms in a collaborative Research and development environment.

Configuration and implementation of the IBTIKAR environment has aided the business user community in conducting various Proof of concepts and execute process to handle various business objectives and extract value. IBTIKAR environment has delivered value to the business community by providing required High-end resources, a programming environment, available open-source algorithms and it has improved the level of efficiency, collaboration and people engagement.