Image processiing of offshore engineering documents

摘要

The technological progress which has taken place during the last decade introduced a totally new outlook regarding the professional computational environment in general, and regarding the engineering profession in particular. During many years engineering computing was performed based on large computer centers, getting bigger and gigger all the time, going from mainframes to super computers, essentially producting numerical results on paper media; Lately, however, it has been realized that a much more productive computational environment can be implemented using an open architecture of client/server type with graphical interfaces, based on lower cost equipment including workstations and PC's. Nowadays, computing power, in the sense of "number crunching", is not the single most important factor regarding engineering problem solving and engineering design. Proper access to relevant engineering information, presented in adequate ways, is at least equally important. This requires the engineer to be able to access digital and graphical information of several different types, coming from different sources, without any artificial limitations imposed by computational environment. This papers gives a summarized report of the experience of the Exploration and Production Area of Petrobras S. A. in transforming manual documents processing in digitized document treatment, via an open distributed client/server computational environment. The paper is mostly focused on the problem of handling technical data and graphical information related to more than 70 fixed offshore platforms.