IBM , Dassault Systems Collaborate on Platform Design

IBM and Dassault Systems announced that PLM solutions from IBM and Dassault Systems are driving a multi-national collaborative global design and manufacturing oil platform project that includes China-based Yantai Raffles Shipyard, Norwegian offshore technology company Sevan Marine, and Brazil's state-run oil company, Petrobras. The complex Sevan Stabilized Platform (SSP) 300 project, wherein Yantai Raffles builds the Sevan Marine-designed oil platform, utilizes CATIA, ENOVIA and DELMIA from Dassault Systemes and epitomizes the advantages that PLM brings to worldwide industry, according to Brian Chang, CEO, Yantai Raffles Shipyard. The Yantai-built SSP 300s will be deployed by its customer Petrobras.

Citing the transformative power of 3D and PLM at DaratechPLANT, a recent energy industry conference held in Houston, USA, Chang outlined an urgent and stirring vision for his own industry and others. "Manufacturing today essentially uses decades-old processes streamlined with new technology. The goal isn't to speed up the old ways of doing things or worry about interoperability and archaic standardization arguments. It's about finding new ways to accomplish sustainable development, adoption of best practices, knowledge reuse and ultimately on-time delivery." Until recently, the offshore industry opted for retrofitted oil tankers as offshore storage and production facilities. But a shortage of available tankers available for retrofitting has changed the competitive landscape in the Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) market. The SSP 300 FPSO is a large circular, floating platform used to store and process 300,000 barrels of oil in an on-board processing plant. The SSP 300 project uses IBM PLM solutions to facilitate concurrent design engineering and construction. The tight integration of the V5 architecture enables real-time validation of the FPSO design against analysis requirements and construction processes. This simultaneous validation of design and manufacturing drastically minimizes the revision so common in the energy market.

In the competitive FPSO market, Sevan Marine is a strong, compact organization, using CATIA V5 and ENOVIA to control its projects and ensure delivery on-time and on-budget. Simulation of the SSP 300 manufacturing process with DELMIA, Dassault Systemes' digital manufacturing solution, enables the interchange between manufacturing engineers and design engineers to which Chang refers.