Toward Seamless Interoperability between Real-time Drilling Systems and Versatile Simulation and Testing Environment

Drilling operation efficiency needs to be constantly improved. This can be achieved by a greater cooperation between the drilling operation stakeholders in order to take full advantage of available real-time information and by reducing the time necessary to test and validate new drilling technologies that are capable of efficiency improvements.

Part 1: Attaining seamless interoperability between real-time drilling systems by using semantical descriptions of drilling signals.

The drilling process is the result of the cooperative actions of many different individual systems, some present at the rig site, others downhole, provided by multiple independent service companies. The constellation of involved services and equipment changes with the different phases of the drilling process, from drilling, to cementing or completing, i.e. in practice as often as every few days. The optimization and automatization of the drilling process implies communication between the different drilling systems: each of those systems can provide valuable information to other parts of the drilling process and can draw benefits in having access to information provided by the other parts of the drilling operation. At the moment, sharing information between systems requires a lot of manual work, not because communication protocols are not in place, but because the actual meaning of real-time signals is elusive to computer systems. Hence, the seamless interoperability of drilling systems passes by defining a computer readable semantic of drilling signals. The difficulty in defining the meaning of drilling real-time signals is related to their wide richness and variability. Also new sensors and machines are introduced regularly and therefore any form of static semantical definition method is doomed to cause delays and frustrations over time. So, to obtain a high degree of flexibility, for now and in the future, it is proposed to utilize semantic networks to define the computer readable meaning of drilling real-time signals. Several demonstrations of the utilization of computer readable semantic descriptions of drilling real-time signals, to achieve seamless interoperability between different companies, have been conducted. These tests will be used to illustrate the reasons and principles of the chosen solution.

Part 2: A simulator environment designed for accelerating the development of drilling automation technologies

Drilling automation encompasses methods that analyze, estimate, and ultimately control, the highly dynamic and complex drilling process. Automated drilling has so far been used to assist drilling of challenging wells but is now seen as a possible technology to reduce drilling costs and improve energy efficiency. The transition to more advanced automation solutions not only put high demands on the drilling technologies under development but also on the infrastructure used for developing, testing and qualifying these new technologies. The availability of realistic and scalable test environments for automated drilling systems may speed up the qualification of new drilling technologies. This will in turn increase the potential for the industry to reduce costs and minimize the carbon footprint of drilling operations as a by-product of energy efficiency improvements. Since 2016, a high-fidelity drilling simulator has been established and tested to facilitate the development and validation of real-time systems that can assist drilling operations. The simulator can be accessed through a web Application Programming Interface (API) and run from a web client or as a Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulator from a control system environment with programmable logic controllers (PLCs). The web enablement makes the simulator suitable for testing new software from anywhere in the world without any installation needed. The HIL functionality enables a workflow from early development stages to industrial pilots involving testing in a realistic environment. This webinar will summarize the objectives, technical solutions, and results obtained. In the next development stage of OpenLab, online access to recorded data, not only simulated data, will be possible in a user-friendly manner, compared to today’s data repositories. The semantical descriptions of drilling signals, presented in Part 1 of this webinar, will significantly reduce the time and resources needed to collect and process recorded data for post analysis and for research and innovation.

All content contained within this webinar is copyrighted by Eric Cayeux, Dr. Benoit Daireaux and Dr. Jan Einar Gravdal and its use and/or reproduction outside the portal requires express permission from Eric Cayeux, Dr. Benoit Daireaux and Dr. Jan Einar Gravdal.