Opinion
Oil rig systems and the need for independent testing
Brian Luff casts a critical eye on the lack of independent testing on oil rig systems and how this needs to change to prevent more disasters like the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico .
Brian Luff ofrece un punto de vista crítico sobre la falta de pruebas independientes en los sistemas de plataformas petrolíferas y la necesidad de cambiar esto para evitar otros desastres como el reciente derrame de petróleo de BP en el Golfo de México.
Brian Luff wirft einen kritischen Blick auf die fehlende unabhängige Überprüfung von Ölplattformen und wie sich dies ändern muss, damit sich weitere Katastrophen wie die letzte Ölpest durch BP im Golf von Mexiko nicht mehr wiederholen.
A
s always happens, news media have lost interest in a story about which they were totally obsessed only a few weeks ago. Te
catastrophic effects of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will be felt for a long time, perhaps for more than a decade, but the media have moved on to the next headline. Maybe the long term effects are not
as obvious and dramatic as a flock of oil- sodden sea birds struggling pathetically to survive in their ruined habitat. Tey are felt by the proprietors of, and workers in, a devastated tourist industry. Tey are felt by pensioners whose investments are shrunk by the need to divert billions from what would have been profits into reparations and damages. Tey are felt by all of us for whom prices will go up as a result of a diminished appetite for deepwater drilling.
Environmental disaster Although the media may have moved on, more responsible interested parties will be spending a long time and a lot of effort trying to figure out what caused the Deepwater Horizon explosion in April 2010, an explosion lest we forget that not only caused an environmental disaster but also claimed the lives of eleven people. Perhaps, despite their best efforts, investigators will never be able to tell us what happened in which case we’ll simply have to be satisfied with speculation, or educated guesswork. Such speculation has started already which has certainly struck a chord with us. How many people know what is involved in drilling the sea bed for oil? Far from being a simply mechanical process, it actually depends on a lot of software-
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www.engineerlive.com
“Given the amount of embedded software in oil-rig systems, or the dozens of operations that are carried out under software control, it is no wonder that software is getting the third degree.”
Brian Luff, Chairman, Critical Software
intensive control systems. It is not widely appreciated, but most of the sophisticated technology that shapes all our lives depends on a lot of software. Sometimes, software failures are an inconvenience. So you had to restart your PC? Big deal. How about if the pilot’s ‘glass cockpit’ packs up in the middle of your holiday flight. Tat gives a whole new meaning to the ‘blue screen of death’! In the case of Deepwater Horizon, it is clear from the Transocean interim report to the Waxman committee that control system software is falling under suspicion1
. Reports have already surfaced
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