A MULTIMEDIA WORKFLOW-BASED COLLABORATIVE

ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENT

ntegrating an Adaptive Workflow System with a Multimedia Collaboration System

and a Collaborative Virtual Environment for Petroleum Engineering

Ismael H. F. Santos

1, 2, 3

, Carla Valle

Fraunhofer Gesellschaft,FhG, Sankt Augustin, Germany

CENPES, Petrobras Research Center, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Alberto B. Raposo

, Marcello Gattass

Tecgraf, Computer Graphics Technology Group, PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Keywords: Collaborative Engineering, Workflow Systems, Collaborative Virtual Environments.

Abstract: In this paper we discuss the scenario of Petroleum Engineering projects of Petrobras, a large Brazilian

governmental oil & gas company. Based on this scenario, we define a set of requirements and system

architecture to guide the construction of a Collaborative Engineering Environment for assisting the control

and execution of large and complex industrial projects in oil industry, specifically tailored for Petroleum

Engineering. The environment is composed by the integration of three different technologies of group work:

Workflow Management System, Multimedia Collaborative System and Collaborative Virtual Environments.

1 INTRODUCTION

The present work is motivated by the necessity to

find effective solutions for collaboration of team

workers during the execution of large and complex

Petroleum Engineering projects at Petrobras. The

necessity of collaboration is especially acute in oil &

gas industry, where techniques such as immersive

virtual environments with large display walls,

stereographics projection systems, videoconference

tools and auditory display systems are pushing the

limits of teamwork activities.

In this paper we introduce a set of application

requirements and define the system architecture of a

Collaborative Engineering Environment (CEE),

tailored for assisting the control and execution of

large and complex industrial projects in oil & gas

industry. The proposed CEE is composed by the

integration of three different technologies of

distributed group work: Workflow Management

System (WfMS), Multimedia Collaborative System

(MMCS) and Collaborative Virtual Environments

(CVE). It is intended to control the execution of

engineering projects involving many geographically

distributed teams. It also allows an easy integration

of different applications providing the teamworkers

with means of information exchange, aiming to

reduce the barriers imposed by applications with

limited or no collaboration support. This

environment needs to be extensible, flexible and

platform-independent, allowing a transparent flow of

information among different teams and their models.

In the following section we present some aspects

for our solution and discuss related works. Then, in

section 3, we present the problem and the solution

requirements. In section 4, the system architecture is

discussed. Conclusions finish the paper.

2 RELATED WORK

Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) assist in

the specification, modeling, and enactment of

structured work process within organizations. These

systems are a special type of collaboration

259

H. F. Santos I., Valle C., B. Raposo A. and Gattass M. (2004).

A MULTIMEDIA WORKFLOW-BASED COLLABORATIVE ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENT - Integrating an Adaptive Workﬂow System with a Multimedia

Collaboration System and a Collaborative Virtual Environment for Petroleum Engineering.

In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 259-262

DOI: 10.5220/0002656702590262

 SciTePress

technology which can be described as

“organizationally aware groupware” [Ellis, 96].

According to the Workflow Management Coalition

[WfMC, 95] there are different types of workflows,

which suits different organizational problems. The

type of workflow used in this work follows the

definition of “adaptive workflow”. This kind of

workflow enables the coordination of different types

of exception, dynamic change problem and

possibilities of late modelling and local adaptation of

particular workflow instances. The support for

managing partials workflows present in an “adaptive

workflow” is very attractive for our purposes

because processes in engineering domains have a

very dynamic nature which means that they cannot

be planned completely in advance and are under

change during execution. Furthermore, in contrast to

well-structured business processes, they are

characterized by more cooperative forms of work

whose concrete process steps cannot be prescribed.

MMCS such as Videoconferencing Systems

(VCS), contain no knowledge of the work processes,

and therefore are not “organizationally aware”.

These systems are best suited for unstructured group

activities once that audiovisual connectivity and

shared documents enable flexible group processes.

The drawback is that all coordination tasks are left to

the conference participants. The combination of

MMCS and VCS can support problems which cannot

be well supported by each one of them isolated.

Embedding synchronous teamwork as part of the

workflow produces a complementary way of

conducting project activities. Such integration would

enable a continuous stream of tasks and activities in

which fast, informal, ad-hoc, and direct actions can

be taken through conferences within the workflow.

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are a

special case of Virtual Reality environment systems,

where the emphasis is to provide distributed teams

with a virtual space where they can meet as if face-

to-face, co-exist and collaborate while sharing and

manipulating in real-time the virtual artifact of

interest [Goebbels, 03]. CVEs are becoming

increasingly used due to a significant increase in

cost-effective computer power, advances in

networking technology, as well as database,

computer graphics and display technologies. They

have been used mainly by automotive and aircraft

manufactures aiming to improve the overall

product’s quality and to reduce project’s life cycle,

cutting down costs and time to market new products.

The integration of MMCS systems into a WfMS is

not new; [Weber, 97] proposed the integration of a

VC tool into a WfMS in order to furnish a

synchronous collaboration work. To allow the

coordination of the conference by the WfMS he

suggests the creation of new entity in the workflow

model, called “conference activity”. Another

important aspect is the time dimension. Conferences

that are already planned at the time of the creation of

the workflow are called pre-scheduled, while an ad-

hoc conference is the one that was not foreseeable at

the time when the workflow model is specified. This

implies that in the former case some of the steps can

be formally prescribed in the WfMS providing a

tighter control of the results and documents

generated during the conference section by the

workflow engine, while in the later the results of the

section should be updated by the users in the system.

In the literature there are a lot of proposals

concerning integration of a WfMS and other

technologies. [Joeris, 97] proposes the combination

with a Document Management System (DMS). He

suggests the creation of a new data-oriented

perspective for the WfMS, centered on the

documents and data produced during the execution

of tasks, in order to improve the coordination and

cooperation support for engineering processes.

[Weske, 98] proposes the junction with a

Geographic Information System to combine a data-

oriented view with a process-oriented view aiming

to support the complex cycle of process and data

modeling in environmental-related geoprocessing

applications. This integration is very suitable for our

solution because many activities in Offshore

Engineering require the use of geo-referenced data.

Sevy, [Sevy, 00] proposes the creation of a CEE

called Collaborative Design Studio to enhance the

design engineering process through the integration

of a Computer-Aided Design and engineering tools

(CAD/CAE), a MMCS, and archiving functions.

3 PROBLEM DEFINITION

In this work we will focus our attention to Offshore

Engineering projects. The project of a new

production unit is a very lengthy and expensive

process. Usually projects involve not only

geographically distributed teams but also teams of

specialists in different areas using different software

tools. The interoperability of those tools is still an

issue in the industry and is a mandatory requisite for

any viable collaborative solution.

Due to their huge complexity projects are divided

into smaller interrelated subprojects where each one

deals with an abstract representation of the others.

To cope with the problems that usually happens to

such a division, we propose the creation of an

Agent-based Awareness mechanism to help users

identify and solve conflicts. Another difficulty

presented in those projects is that, although the

specialists deal with the same artifacts (platforms,

ICEIS 2004 - HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION

260

mooring systems, etc.) they usually have different

data representations for those objects according to

the needs of each application requiring from the

solution some support for multi-resolution

representation of the data. For example, in structural

and naval engineering the models usually have dense

polygonal meshes, with a few objects representing

the outline of the artifacts, suitable for static and

dynamic stability studies with numerical methods. In

CAD/CAE the models usually have objects with

coarse grid meshes suitable for good visual

representation, but the problem is that all objects that

comprise the artifact should be represented yielding

huge models. For real time visualization those

models are almost intractable and, even today,

represents a great challenge for computer

graphics.due

3.1 CEE Requirements

Based on previous works in the related areas and on

an analysis of the domain of our scenario, we define

a set of requirements for our CEE.

Communication support - CEE should provide

different communication support possibilities:

synchronous, asynchronous, and enabled in various

media types. These supports should be provided in a

seamless way, so that users can start a

communication of one or of another type while they

are interacting with the CEE, or they should be able

to plan certain time for a specific communication

interaction. The communication support should be

integrated to the other tools in the CEE and provide

means of recording conversation and retrieving old

ones. This requirement helps user solve their

project’s problems in critical situation, with fast

interaction and negotiation, and it allows the

recovery of useful pieces of communication used to

solve similar problems in the past.

Coordination support – at the project

management level, multiple and different visions of

the on-going project must be provided. Users have

different background and need different types of

information to execute their duties. Project

management should also be feasible in a CEE.

Cooperation and flexibility support – there should

be process model flexibility support, like dynamic

change of process instances during run-time to

support dynamically evolving processes, possibility

of executing rollback of processes (reset, redo, undo,

recover, ignore, etc) and reuse of process fragments.

The cooperation support must provide different

levels of data access: local and distributed, shared,

public and private access, versioning control of

engineering models and related data, concurrency

control and synchronization. It is also necessary to

provide support for different types of data

interchange, concurrent work on shared copies,

change propagation. Different types of visualization

should also be available at the CEE, like real-time

simulation and visualization of 3D models;

walkthroughs in the managed models; object

interaction and manipulation; edition and planning

and lately, access to organizational work history.

Awareness – in our scenario the most important

types of awareness are: event monitoring – to

observe what is going on in all separate parts and

provide active notification to the right person, at the

right time and the right sub-system; workspace

awareness in the VE – to provide control of

collaborative interaction and changing of the user

location; mutual awareness – to allow users see each

other’s identity and observe each other’s actions;

group awareness – to facilitate the perception of

groups of interest connecting people who need to

collaborate more intensely.

Integration Management Infrastructure – at this

level, several services should be available in order to

guarantee the data and modeling persistency, and the

different levels of access control to different user

roles in our scenario. Here we include the shared

workspace and results service, access control

service, user management service, data

synchronization service and security service.

CVE specific requirements – high performance

and scalability to support execution of large shared

virtual worlds, which varies widely in size and

number of participants, over long periods of time; a

persistence mechanism to save and restore world

state between activations; version-safe updating

mechanisms, because large and long-lived virtual

worlds tend to incorporate different versions of the

same components; composability, so that one may

easily and effectively combine worlds and world

components developed by different organizations;

dynamic extensibility, the architecture must permit

the seamless run time extension and replacement of

any part of its hosted application.

4 PROPOSED SOLUTION

Our CEE has component based architecture (Figure

1) to facilitate the reuse of elements. The

architecture of the CEE uses a WfMS as its kernel

while the MMCS, CVE and the other components are

seamlessly accessed according to the collaborative

necessities of the team workers.

The integration of the WfMS with other

components is done in a seamless way through the

Collaboration Bus (CBus) in a way that the user

always interacts with the same interface independent

A MULTIMEDIA WORKFLOW-BASED COLLABORATIVE ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENT: INTEGRATING AN

ADAPTATIVE WORKFLOW WITH A MULTIMEDIA COLLABORATION SYSTEM AND A COLLABORATIVE

VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT FOR PETROLEUM ENGENEERING

261

of the environment he is currently using. This is a

very important aspect of the solution to keep the user

conscious of what he is doing and what should be

the next steps of the current task being executed.

The CBus represents the collaborative infrastructure

provided by the CEE core functions to fulfill the

requirements discussed throughout the paper. The

CVE is being constructed on top of Avango

[Tramberend, 99], an object-oriented framework for

distributed VR applications.

All the consistency, adequacy and compatibility

of the shared data among its users should be done by

the kernel in conjunction with the SDMS, in order to

avoid, or at least to diminish, non useful iterations

during the project’s life cycle. The ability of reusing

partial workflows, which were previously stored in

the system with some guidelines, will provide an

optimized usage of the available computational

resources and also a better control of the costs and

the time scheduling. We use OpenORB to

implement the architecture of the system with the

following CORBA

services: Persistence, Life

Cycle, Trading, Event e Relationship (Figure 2). The

user interacts with the system through its GUI and

from there the WfMS guides the execution accessing

the other components accordingly.

In this architecture the requirements are fulfilled

by different association of the components,

Communication: MMCS and Collaborative Support

Service; Coordination: WfMS; Cooperation: WfMS,

DMS, SDMS; Collaboration: CVE; Awareness:

Agent-based Awareness Service.

5 CONCLUSIONS

This paper presented a set of requirements and

system architecture of the CEE that we are currently

undertaking. As next steps of this work, we plan to

continue refining the architecture of the CEE, and as

a proof of concept we intend to develop a prototype

that will be used at Petrobras and usability studies

will follow afterwards. Through the use of the CEE

we expect that users easily mitigate their problems

during the execution of projects. We also intend to

improve the effectiveness of the use of VR

technology once that is now seamless integrated in

the workflow of the team workers. Although this

work is focused on a solution for Offshore

Engineering projects, we believe that the CEE could

also be used in other areas as well.

REFERENCES

Ellis, C. A., Nutt, G. J., 1996. Workflow: The Process

Spectrum. In NSF Workshop on Workflow and Proc.

Automation in Infor. Systems, Athens, Georgia, 1996.

Goebbels, G., Lalioti, V., Göbel, M., 2003. Design Eval of

Team Work in Dist. CVE. In VRST’03, Osaka, Japan.

Joeris, G. 1997. Cooperative and Integrated Workflow and

Doc. Manag. Eng Apps. In 8

Inter. Workshop DEXA

Sevy, J., Zaychik V., Hewett T.T., Regli, W. C. 2000.

Developing and Evaluating Collaborative Engineering

Studios. In The 9

Proceeding of WET ICE’2000,USA.

Tramberend H., 1999. Avocado: A Distributed Virtual

Reality Framework. In The Proc of the IEEE VR99.

Weber, M., Partsch, G., Hock, Schweitzer, J. 1997. Integ.

Sync. Mult.Collab WfMgmt. In SIGGROUP, Phoenix.

Weske, M., Vossen, G., Medeiros. C.B., Pires, F. 1998.

Workflow Managemet in Geoprocessing Applications.

In Tech. Report No. 04-98-I, Univ. Muenster, GE.

Workflow Reference Model, 1995.Workflow Management

Coalitition, Doc. No. TC00-1003, Issue 1.1,1995.

Figure 1: Components of the CEE.

Shared

DataMgmt

System

Collaborative

Virtual

Environment

Distributed

Virtual

Environment

Collaborative

Support

Services

Calendar

Chat

Instant

Messenger

Document

Management

System

WfMS

Multimedia

Collaboration

System

Whiteboar

VideoConf

Shared

Text Editors

Engineering

Applications

System

Numerical

Simulations

Grid Comput

GIS

Agent-based

Awareness

Service

Security

Manager

Service

Figure 2: CORBA architecture of the CEE.

WfMS

MMCS

CVE

SDMS

EAS

LifeCycl

Trading

Relationship

Event

Persistence

Application

CORBA

Facilities

CEE

Facilities

GUI

Common Ob

ect Re

uest Bro

ICEIS 2004 - HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION

262