Demonstration of Seamless Interoperability for Automatic Drilling Management in a Multi-Vendor Context

Abstract Drilling operations involve many different companies like the operating company, the drilling contractor, and several service companies. The personnel at the rig site contribute to provide recommended actions to construct the well as smoothly and efficiently as possible. The question is whether it is possible to design an interoperability infrastructure that allows the computer systems of each of these companies to communicate with each other's and to provide a pathway for seamless automation of the drilling process across multiple stakeholders. A group of volunteers from several different companies has worked on defining such an interoperability framework. It is a sub-committee of the SPE Drilling System Automation Technical Section named Drilling and Wells Interoperability Standards (D-WIS). To test the designed D-WIS infrastructure, a demonstration has been organized that has been video streamed live for more than three hours. The objective was to show that multiple external advisory systems could provide inputs during a simulated drilling operation while encountering several hard stringers. The demonstration has been repeated three times to focus on specific subsets of the D-WIS infrastructure at each iteration. For simplicity, the demonstration used a simulation environment with a generic Automated Drilling Control System (ADCS) that implemented minimum automation functionalities such as hoist, rotate, circulate and drill. The demonstration has shown that the drilling process state could be estimated and published in real-time on a drilling data hub. The data hub acts as the central repository where all signals are exchanged, following the blackboard system architecture. This includes real-time signals but also more complex data structure such as capability descriptions of the ADCS functions and planning data for drilling and well operations such as pressure and temperature gradients, BHA and drill string configuration, completions, and trajectory etc. In general, the blackboard utilizes semantic technology to allow any data provider and consumer to interpret the meaning of the exchanged information without involving configuration by humans. Furthermore, a composer application gathers the provided advice and generates the configuration signals to the currently running automated functions on the ADCS. A scheduler oversees the progress of the operation and reacts automatically to unexpected changes of context like when drilling through soft to hard rock, or vice versa. The demonstration showed that the advice generated by multiple external applications developed by several independent companies could be processed and managed to control the simulated drilling operation smoothly even though several unexpected drilling situations were generated by the drilling simulator. This demonstration shows that the generic D-WIS infrastructure can play an important role in facilitating the adoption of drilling automation as it allows to develop new automation functionalities once and deploy them everywhere. Older rigs may become "smarter" by retro fitting the D-WIS structure and may become capable of lower levels of autonomous operations.