Time and Time again.

Monitoring the world’s ocean floor sounds quite straight forwards as a concept. However, as I am sure you can imagine, it is rather more tricky in its execution.

One of the surprisingly complex aspects of our work… is time.

Time.

When clocks move backwards or forwards an hour, time – for UltraMAP at least – gets tricky.

It’s because, when time jumps back and forth, playback of events really takes some thinking about.

Time changes don’t affect protection. You’re always protected with UltraMAP.

But playback requests that span a time change really can make our heads spin!

When clocks change we obviously need to make sure we either don’t ever have a blank hour or – with regards to monitoring shifts – we need to make sure that we don’t all turn up in the same hour!

That’s the thing with actual human beings looking out for valuable subsea assets – the protection is superb! But we need to have the shifts sitting neatly next to each other.

Not overlapping.

AssetMonitor – UltraMAP’s world leading Asset Monitoring Software.

Time was also an interesting concept as we developed AssetMonitor.

The users of AssetMonitor see the time in AssetMonitor as it is for them locally.

But we need to store the data we receive in a standard, over-arching time format.

This is fine… but it gets quite complicated when AssetMonitor does some of its cleverness.

For example when a customer or a member of our 24/7 monitoring team requests that AssetMonitor plays back an animation of historic vessel movements associated with an event or an area.

Calculating the actual from/to times is hard!

This is all seamless for the user of course.

But the more you think about the question, ‘What time is it?’ in a global system operating globally every minute of every day, the more the answer becomes not so simple

Many afternoons were spent contemplating ‘time’ during the development of AssetMonitor.

Because with always-on protection, time and timing is crucial.

Getting time right… takes time.