Interoperability Definitions

 

Interoperability of Drilling Data

Interoperability between systems in well construction is achieved when any system can exchange meaningful information with any other system, at present or in the future. The exchange of information occurs between authorized systems, without prior knowledge of each systems unique characteristics, and in an environment where the constellation of systems is constantly changing.” [Source: D-WIS]

Levels of Drilling Data Interoperability

There are typically five levels of interoperability:

·         Technical- drilling systems can exchange binary signals with each other’s but there are no requirements that the systems are capable to make sense of the binary data, e.g. data are transmitted through high speed telemetry, yet the provider of the high speed telemetry is unable to decipher the information that passes through its network.

·         Syntactical- there is a protocol that allows to send/receive numerical values between drilling systems under access control, e.g. OPC-UA used in a key/tag structure, WITSML log objects allow to exchange Booleans, enumerations, integers, floating-point values, yet without human interpretation to connect to the right tag or mnemonics, it is not possible to interpret the meaning of the data.

·         Semantic- There is an agreement about the meaning of exchanged data between drilling systems, e.g. WITS0, OPC-UA’s RIM & DIM, WITSML’s drilling data model (except logs), DDHub semantic network allow to exchange drilling data either based on an pre-agreed static data model description (WITS0, RIM DIM, WITSML) or a dynamic description (DDHub (Cayeux, Daireaux, Saadallah, & Alyaev, 2019)).

·         Dynamic- New drilling data information can be added on the fly and drilling systems can interpret the meaning the data, e.g. DDHub allows to describe new signals or configurations that have never been thought earlier.

·         Organizational- Different disciplines can exchange drilling data regardless of their different domain perspectives, e.g.  geologists, geo-physicists, reservoir engineers, petro-physicists, geo-mechanics have all different views on drilling data than drilling engineers and all of them are equally valid.