Beyond Spreadsheets: Building an Open Digital Ecosystem for Subsea Pipeline Engineering

Subsea engineering has always been driven by innovation. Over the past decades, the industry has relied on a combination of specialised commercial software, spreadsheets, and bespoke scripts developed by individual engineers and organisations. While these tools have enabled countless successful projects, they often remain isolated, difficult to maintain, and inaccessible beyond the teams that created them.

At Subsea Energies, we believe the next generation of subsea engineering requires a more open, integrated, and transparent digital ecosystem.

Our vision is to bring modern software engineering principles into the subsea industry: open architectures, automation, reproducible workflows, and reusable engineering components that allow engineers to spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time understanding the physics behind the problems they solve.

PySubsea was born from this vision. It is an open-source Python framework designed to provide reusable building blocks for subsea engineering, allowing engineers to develop transparent calculations, automate engineering workflows, and build reliable digital solutions on a common foundation.

This philosophy extends beyond numerical algorithms. True digital transformation requires improving the entire engineering workflow, from model creation and analysis to data processing, visualisation, and communication.

InpPy was developed to bridge the gap between traditional Abaqus input files and modern Python-based workflows. Through its Visual Studio Code extension, engineers can work more efficiently with hybrid Abaqus-Python models, improving readability, maintainability, and collaboration.

OOS Studio represents another step towards this vision, transforming domain-specific engineering data into intuitive interactive applications. By providing modern tools for visualising, processing, and exploring complex datasets, it enables engineers and clients to gain faster and clearer insights from their analyses.

These projects are different pieces of the same philosophy: engineering software should be transparent, extensible, and developed with the same level of rigour as the engineering analyses it supports.

Our objective is not to replace established commercial software. Finite element solvers, installation simulation packages, and specialist design tools will continue to play a fundamental role in subsea projects. The opportunity lies in connecting these technologies through open interfaces, automation, intelligent data management, and community-driven software development.

At Subsea Energies, we see the future of subsea engineering not as a single all-encompassing application, but as a connected ecosystem where engineering knowledge, algorithms, and workflows can be shared, validated, and continuously improved.

PySubsea, InpPy, OOS Studio, and future developments are all part of this journey. A long-term commitment to building the digital foundations of a more efficient, transparent, and collaborative subsea industry.

"At Subsea Energies, we are building an open, connected digital engineering ecosystem that enables engineers to work more transparently, efficiently, and collaboratively across modern subsea analysis workflows.”