Technology

by Erik Dellinger, Kepware Technologies

Before I get into Kepware’s current implementation of the BACnet Calendar and Schedule Objects (available in KEPServerEX version 5.15 and later), we should cover objects in general terms. When we talk about objects, we are essentially talking about structured data. You can think of structured data as how we store and organize data so that it can be easily and efficiently referenced and used. For example, rather than reading your first name, your last name, and then your location, you read it all at once. Structured data is a collection of properties or attributes that can contain various information, some of which is useless on its own but paints a larger and…

By Stefan Hoppe, TwinCAT Product Manager, BECKHOFF Automation; President of the OPC Foundation Europe

Energy monitoring in decentralized real estate properties enables operators to establish energetically optimized statutory management requirements. As an example, the municipal sector often operates up to 2,000 real estate properties via facility management. The energy monitoring system, e2watch® from regio iT Corporation for Information Technology has been developed in cooperation with the real estate and facility management department of the city of Aachen, Germany.

The e2watch® system utilizes a compact Beckhoff controller as a decentralized control unit for data acquisition and buffering. However, the most sophisticated feature is the synchronization with the Cloud using a configurable scheduler. This system uses the manufacturer-independent interoperability standard, OPC-UA (also known as international standard IEC 62541) with integrated security mechanisms as a data transport layer. The collected data gets pushed from a control unit (acting as a PLCopen function block standardized OPC-UA Client) as historical data…

By Martin Cavanaugh

The Society of Petroleum Engineers has formed a technical section to accelerate the development and implementation of automated drilling systems. Automated drilling systems are intended to increase the productivity of drillers, while at the same time increasing safety for both humans and the environment.

By Rich Hunzinger, B-Scada

The Oil and Gas Industry faces a number of new challenges in the coming years. From the obvious challenge of managing a finite resource to ever-changing environmental regulations and the consequent competitive pressures, it’s easy to understand why industry leaders are continually striving to find ways to optimize and improve operational efficiency.

The new digital landscape of the industry has led to a proliferation of data, with greater frequency, at every stage of the business lifecycle. This abundance of data has led to new ideas about how this data can best be managed to maximize its value. The standards introduced by PPDM 3.8 include 53 subject areas intended to give executives a model for a Master Data Management solution.

A data management model is necessary largely because of the separate data sets that must be monitored – such as location data, well data and production data – which have traditionally been grouped and viewed separately. Now, research is showing that the proliferation of these information “silos” and the lack of a unified view can lead to a number of undesirable…

By Jay Hollingsworth, Energistics and Laurence Ormerod, Ormerod Consulting

The Digital Oil Field uses technology based solutions to help companies leverage their resources to more quickly and accurately capture and analyze large volumes of data generated in the field such as down-hole sensors and MWD applications. It encompasses the complete suite of upstream activities and allows analysis of the data in real- or near-real time. All this data comes from different applications, different providers, in different formats. The prevailing electronic documents in this space are spreadsheets, PDFs, etc. The effort required of companies to gather the data to run their analyses is both time consuming and costly. Using a common standard format not only reduces costs, it reduces…

By Paul Hunkar, DSInteroperability

In the oil and gas industry there is a push to try to minimize the cost associated with the engineering and validation of the control system. This is especially true for off shore platforms, where there are multiple companies that provide various aspects of these systems. These vendors specialize in topside platform controls or subsea controls, but all of these systems must work together seamlessly. Since these controls are deployed in locations that at times are very hard to reach, making any changes after deployment can be very expensive. The engineering cost for these systems is often in excess of millions of dollars with…

By Frank Horden, Yokogawa

Accelerating industrialisation and rapid population growth has pushed forward the exploration, production, processing and distribution of oil and gas. This rapid expansion has placed increasing technological pressure on the control systems that manage this process.

Here Frank Horden explores the use of OPC – Unified Architecture (OPC-UA) in control systems for oil and gas applications.

By Greg Hale, Industrial Safety and Security Source

Attendees and exhibitors at the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) 2014 in Houston in early May talked about all issues related to the booming oil and gas market, but at the end of the day, safety and security always ended up a main topic of conversation. And it needs to be.

For good reason as users fret about their hundreds of millions, if not billion, dollar investment and want to keep their platforms up and running so they can make as much product, and profit, as possible. Being able to communicate from the well head all the way through to the enterprise – through disparate systems — remains a vital concern for…

By Steve Sponseller, Kepware Technologies

Most of the general public is unaware that there is an automation revolution happening in the exploration and drilling segment of the Oil & Gas Industry. Like most automation endeavors, this revolution is being driven by the demand for improved efficiency, accurate reporting, and escalated safety requirements.

The fast-paced drilling taking place in current shale gas exploration and production sites requires improved process efficiency. Shale gas is a revolution in and of itself, with promises of lower energy costs and less carbon dioxide emissions than traditional hydrocarbon energy sources. Improved efficiency demands are a result of the wide geographic spread of shale plays and the need for multiple wells to drill and frack in order to tap into the gas that is trapped in the shale rock. Companies are also performing advanced analytics on their drilling operations, which allows them to predict…