Control, information and communication technology are key technologies for the development of improved information systems that meet future requirements for environmental sustainability and safety. In particular, the trend shows an emerging need for sustainable energy sources and an increasing activity in environmentally vulnerable and weather exposed areas, like the North and arctic marine areas. These areas contain vast resources, in particular marine and oil/gas resources. All operations in these areas are thus environmentally and safety critical operations.

A sustainable harvesting of the resources in environmentally vulnerable areas is a main concern. Environmental surveillance to monitor the resources and possible threats to these is therefore of main importance. Furthermore, the Norwegian Oil Industry is currently at a crossroad, as a number of the active oil installations are going into their last phase. There are still large unused oil and gas resources, but exploration and extraction of these will require operations on smaller fields at deep sea levels requiring sub-sea installations, and in vulnerable marine environments. The North areas are assumed to contain one third of all the undiscovered oil and gas resources on the Norwegian shelf. Exploration and expansion into these areas are however rendered difficult because of the environmental concerns that must be taken into account in these areas. A main part of the Norwegian fishing industry is based on the fish resources of this area, and also the area contains unique marine environments where oil leakages would be ruinous. To be able to safely extract oil in these areas, it is therefore necessary to be able to rapidly detect and repair any defects and oil leakages that might occur.

The proposed SUP will provide enabling control, information and communication technology for this, in particular for environmental surveillance, leakage detection and subsea intervention and repair. Furthermore, the SUP will provide emerging and enabling technology for sustainable energy sources, including methods for improved efficiency of renewable energy generation, reduced energy consumption, increased efficiency and reduced emission. In addition to developing the emerging and enabling technology for this, it is also a main objective of the SUP to educate qualified personnel. There is an urgent need to educate more specialists within this field, with the competence corresponding to the industrial and governmental needs and challenges with respect to environmental sustainability. We intend to make solid theoretical advances in the key areas described below, and to demonstrate their practical usefulness by laboratory experiments. The project targets several of the strategic areas defined by the Research Council of Norway and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, which are also of strategic importance to Norwegian Industry. The research topics of this project classify directly within the NTNU strategic area Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Furthermore, the SUP is directly related to the NTNU Strategic area Marine and Maritime Research. In particular there will be close cooperation and strong synergy effects with the Centre for Ships and Ocean Structures (CeSOS), which is a Norwegian Centre of Excellence. Also, the SUP will have cooperation with the Ocean Space Lab. The project will, through targeted application studies, also contribute to the NTNU Strategic area of Energy and Environment.

The strategic university program is sponsered with 15 MNOK by:


The Research Council of Norway