Check out the latest product releases from our members:
● Kepware KEPServerEX Version 5.15
● RoviSys OPC UA Client for OpenVMS
● RoviSys OPC UA Server for OpenVMS
● RoviSys OPC UA Connector for OpenVMS
● GENESIS64™ Version 10.85 Software Suite
● Prosys OPC UA Java SDK 2.0
● Prosys OPC UA Client for Android 2.0
By Tom Burke, President and Executive Director of the OPC Foundation
Welcome to the June edition of OPC Connect. The theme of this issue is OPC engagement in the Oil & Gas industry. The OPC Foundation has been actively collaborating with many segments of this sector to facilitate interoperable automation.
I am very excited about these collaborations, as they clearly demonstrate the commitment of our end-users and suppliers to the adoption of OPC UA. This newsletter highlights some of the major achievements of our…
By Nathan Pocock, Director of Compliance
Recently, we have seen a high number of test failures due to application crashes and resource leaks, which is part of our extensive behavior and reliability testing. We have written a new whitepaper on Certification Resource Efficiency Testing that addresses these points of failure and walk you through the exact steps we use in the lab.
Certified OPC products are ideal for production use because they have been tested by the OPC Foundation Certification Test Lab for compliance, interoperability, usability, but most importantly: robust error handling and recovery that will provide years of reliable operations, greatly reducing the costly risks of unavailability and/or shutdown.
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 MatrikonOPC
Shanghai Petrochemical’s Manufacturing Execution System (MES) needed to acquire data from the PLC systems of all of its main devices. Data had to be shared between a total of 51 PLC and DCS systems that came from different vendors and included various models. A proprietary data access solution was not feasible due to the complexity of the system; instead, the company needed…
By Jim Wiles, Software Toolbox
The Texas reputation for size comes with some mighty metrics to back it up. As the largest oil producer in the Union, the state’s wellheads are spread over 268,000 square miles. If you are in the oil and gas industry, on-site management and monitoring of land-based wells can be a logistical challenge as well as a considerable expense. The state boasts nearly one working oil or gas well for every square mile, each requiring stringent monitoring and reporting by the Railroad Commission of Texas, the governmental regulatory agency that oversees the state’s oil and gas industry.
Not surprisingly, automation technology continues to make a significant impact on the upstream and midstream oil and gas business, especially in the areas of remote…
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 Melissa Topp, ICONICS
Over the past decade, software vendors have used Object-Oriented and Service-Oriented Architectures to design products that are both scalable and reliable. However, these successful architectural models only recently started to be used for the exchange of information in offshore oil and gas production.
More recently, the ability to collect and analyze exponentially growing sets of data is at an unprecedented level, due to the wide adoption of Big Data. At the same time, mobile devices are transforming the way…
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 Owl Computing Technologies
As operations and critical infrastructure components become increasingly digitized, the threat to these structures moves from physical threats and attacks to cyber assaults. This means that your electronic perimeter is now as – if not more – important as the physical fence you have around your facility. But there’s a critical problem.
When you have a physical gate, fence, or barrier, your facility is isolated from the outside world. There are actual gatekeepers controlling the flow into and out of your plant, which impedes movement speed but nevertheless moves everything where it needs to be.
With a cyber system, this is…
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…