Those
involved with the facilitation of drilling automation encountered common
problems creating plug and play systems on both land and offshore drilling
rigs. The drilling contractor normally
provides a rig with a control system and sensors that are isolated from
others. Likewise, service companies
routinely provide their own sensors and displays because their package is on a
separate network. Other third-party
companies have limited or no access the data from those mentioned above. Some operators have integrated the rig and
service companies’ data and used their own applications or that of third-party app
providers. The physical effort to
interconnect the various providers and users of this data and to verify the
connection has been overwhelming. Each
of these participants has a unique nomenclature associated with what should
otherwise be a common, shared tag name.
Work Group 2 was tasked to resolve these issues by allowing all the
players to keep their existing systems, including their unique identifiers. The semantic model’s process, described
herein, asks each participant to perform a one-time task to add the descriptors
to their inputs and outputs to allow data interoperability.
D-WIS deals
with data interoperability. Different
groups are examining signal boundaries, communication protocols, signal
transmission, latency, clock synchronization, data quality, etc. The semantic model process does not dictate how
any of these items are addressed, but it does provide a means sharing a
description for each of these elements.
Note that the process does not mean a data provider is required to
provide specific information. That
depends on the provider’s business model and its contractual relationship with
the data consumer. However, if the data
provider does wish to share this metadata to allow data interoperability, they
need only provide some key descriptors, not all of them. The marketplace will ultimately decide how
much information should be shared.