Technology

by Frank Schubert, Vice Chairman of the Working Group Technique; Member of the BACnet Interest Group Europe Advisory Board

The OPC Foundation and BACnet Interest Group Europe founded a common working group to specify a mapping profile between BACnet and OPC UA. This article introduces the basics to understand the mapping between these two technologies.

In the working group the members identified the most commonly expected use-cases. The first approach included in the current documents is a mapping of building automation data from BACnet devices and represent them through a mapping device in OPC UA.

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…