Wireless infrastructure for oil and gas inventory management

The oil and gas industry has unique workflow, working conditions, and other operational and environmental factors that demand an online inventory management solution which can effectively monitor the offshore operations, provide safe workplace for site personnel and track the movement of assets for distribution across the supply chain. Tremendous growth in wireless technologies for tracking and communication provides plethora of opportunities for developing an inventory management system which enables productivity and timely operation of the the offshore plant. In this paper, we have demonstrated an online inventory management system which enables monitoring the essential events in oil and gas offshore environment using a user intuitive web interface application. Through remote monitoring of tote operations, this approach ensures safety of the site personnel by minimizing the need to be available at offshore environment for extended periods to record and perform manual inventory. This proposed online inventory monitoring/management system for tote inventory is built using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks). The operators at remote control room can monitor and take actions based on the real scenario and generated alarms from the monitoring system placed offshore. The site owner can receive timely information about the arrival of totes from onshore and dispatch of totes from offshore yard. In this paper, we have highlighted one of the methods to design an inventory management prototype and emphasize the challenges foreseen in the oil and gas offshore deployment scenario.