Patent ID: 8214243

Claim:
A method for managing large oil field operations comprising: (a) displaying an oil field map on a video monitor, wherein (1) the oil field map comprises oil well objects, oil field facility objects, surface work crew objects, sub-surface work crew objects, safety zones objects, and work equipment rig objects associated with at least one work crew object and having a geographic locater device for tracking its location; (2) the oil field map is customizable by date, has a date selector tool, and wherein each of the oil well objects, oil field facility objects, surface work crew objects, sub-surface work crew objects, work equipment rig objects and safety zones objects comprise a date attribute and a location attribute; (3) each of the surface and sub-surface work crew objects are coded by a visual indicator to indicate a type of work; (4) user selection of a surface or sub-surface work crew object causes a text box to display haying a description of the work associated with the work the crew object; (5) a safety zone object is associated with surface and sub-surface work crew objects and has a radius attribute extending 360 degrees around the center of the work crew object for the distance set by the radius attribute; (b) scheduling at least two surface or sub-surface work crew objects via a domain-specific software application using a computer from which the surface or sub-surface work crew object was extracted; and (c) repeating step (b) above until a portion of the surface and sub-surface work crews are scheduled for a date range of interest wherein the date range of interest is one day and wherein at least a portion of the work crews having work equipment rigs are initially unscheduled at the beginning of the day, and are scheduled throughout the day in response to urgent work needs that arise during the day and based on monitoring of the geographic locater devices associated with the work equipment rigs.