Internet of things (IoT) for Oil and Gas

1. Automating Remote Operations At a time when well drilling and completion complexities are increasing and field experts are becoming scarcer, automation offers many benefits. Besides capturing domain knowledge, automation increases safety and decreases personnel time on-site and therefore lowers cost. Automation has also been proven to improve well quality, and decrease downtime and equipment failures.

2. Enabling Massive Data Collection The data generated from a single well can be sizeable; a large field of wells can produce massive amounts of valuable information. Industrial Internet technology can tackle the large-scale collection across an entire site. The proven results include better asset utilization across all wells, reduced effluents, and accelerated production. Broad oversight also accommodates hydrocarbon recovery, and offers insights that can lead to better decision making about well locations.

3. Integrating Analytics To fully exploit analytics, all of the components of the system under study must be integrated such that information can be reliably gathered. This is especially critical for real-time analytics that directly drive process improvements and production optimizations. The data collection topology behind large-scale analytics can be complex, however. Every smart machine within every system must be connected and data driven up to site busses and eventually into the cloud or control centers for consolidation at the application level. Using DDS across the system allows designers to build a single logical DataBus that connects the various subsystems. A single logical sensor-to-cloud DDS DataBus can hide the underlying complexities of the physical connections between machines, systems, and sites.

4. Securing Operations The recently adopted DDS security standard offers complete security protection for data flows. Data flows can be secure, independent of protocols, roles, and nodes. The DDS security model allows protection of every dataflow. This “per-topic” security is logically simple: the DataBus connects information sources to information sinks. The security model simply enforces the connections by authenticating endpoints and allowing only the configured communications. The protocol supports discovery authentication, data-centric access control, plug-in cryptography, tagging/logging, and secure multicast – in a 100%-standards-compliant manner. Because it leverages the existing data-centric design, adding security to an existing DDS system does not require any additional coding; security is implemented only by configuration. Truly robust security requires both protection (stopping unwanted activities) and detection (finding and reporting when the protection has been compromised). This is why, for instance, a typical laptop has both a firewall (protection) and a virus scanner (detection). The DDS DataBus also makes it easy to combine both protection and detection. Because it is a multi-channel bus, DDS supports facile data tapping. Because that bus has extensive information about the connection information and access to the data formats, it enables tapping programs to detect anomalies.

5. Replacing Special Software with Industrial Internet Platforms Developing distributed systems applications traditionally required a significant amount of networking and error handling logic. DDS middleware makes it possible to replace previously low-level communications programming with high-level data-centric publish/subscribe interfaces. Topics guide communications, rather than strict physical addressing schemes (sockets, host names, IP addresses, and ports).