Human Centric Digital Transformation and Operator 4.0 for the Oil and Gas Industry

Working at an oil and gas facility, such as a drilling rig, production facility, processing facility, or storage facility, involves various challenges, including health and safety risks. It is possible to leverage emerging digital technologies such as smart sensors, wearable or mobile devices, big data analytics, cloud computing, extended reality technologies, robotic systems, and drones to mitigate the challenges faced by oil and gas workers. While these technologies are not new to the oil and gas industry, most of its existing digital transformation initiatives follow business or process-centric approaches, in which the critical driver of the technology adoption is the enhancement of production, efficiency, and revenue. As a result, they may not address the challenges faced by the workers. As oil and gas workers are among the essential assets in the oil and gas industry, it is vital to address the challenges faced by these workers. This paper proposes a human-centric digital transformational framework for the oil and gas industry to deploy existing digital technologies to enhance their workers' health, safety, and working conditions. The paper outlines the critical challenges faced by oilfield workers, introduces a system architecture to implements a human-centric digital transformation, discusses the opportunities of the proposed framework, and summarizes the key impediment for the proposed framework.