Digital energy and integrated operations: the importance of data

Digital energy is broadly defined as the convergence of assets, information technology, and advanced communications systems. Although the concept has been around for a while, it is finally delivering some of the promise of what was once sold as automation, business process reengineering, continuous improvement, or change management. 

Digital energy pays dividends through reduced operating costs, higher productivity, safer operations, increased production and a growth in reserves. To gain these benefits, companies must effectively manage the data which underlies virtually all aspects of digital energy. The concern now is that the sheer number of players in digital energy projects causes problems when it comes to exchanging data between systems.

Standards and semantics

To gain all rewards and efficiencies companies expect, data management systems must have the flexibility to exchange information and knowledge. Without commonly understood and widely available interfaces, however, there is no effective way to connect all of the equipment, applications and people who form the basis of digital energy systems.  Standards help define how these interfaces function.

Standards also greatly improve the overall data quality. Why? Because once the data is represented in a common format, it is finally exposed in a way that allows a direct ‘apples to apples’ comparison of quality, which isn’t really possible when the data resides in discrete applications and formats

An encouraging example of standardization in our industry is the development and widespread use of the WITSML™ standards for exchanging drilling information, as well as PRODML™ for the exchange of production information. Even though the potential payoff is huge, the industry has been slow to make significant investments in this area.

As the concept of digital energy continues to evolve, look for several trends to dominate:

• A focus on the creation of value rather than simply the reduction of costs
• The expansion of digital technologies as a primary methodology for connecting surface and sub-surface operations and data
• Recognition that there will be no digital oilfields without the effective management of data and sharing of information.

The standards themselves are not necessarily the end of the story. One important aspect of this discussion is semantics, the derivation of meaning from the nature and structure of a term. Both the word itself and how it is used contribute to its definition – for instance, a ‘log’ in oilfield usage is generally quite different from a ‘log’ in the lumber industry.

Having standards helps greatly in setting the structure for terminology. However, there is not always agreement on the exact terminology employed, both between discrete applications and even from one area of a company to another. Even if a company broadly adopts a standardized approach, there are still many issues associated with conversion of legacy data, as well as the difficulties of enabling data sharing with companies who do not use the same standard.

The Petris solution: a ‘semantic GPS’ and flexible integration platform

Adoption of a standardized approach to data naming, structure and exchange requires that current and legacy data be reformatted and converted to be compliant with the new standard. This is true regardless of the standard selected.

The PetrisWINDS Enterprise integration platform provides the means by which a company can adopt and implement any standard, across any application they may use. Through the use of adapters specific to each application, data can be mapped to the new standard and moved as needed. The lightweight ‘Google-style’ index within PetrisWINDS Enterprise allows users to search across all data collections, regardless of format, and then move selected data sets as required for their analysis. Data can be moved across and stored in the new standardized format, or left in its existing data stores to be accessed and moved only as needed.

Petris also has an application called the Semantic Manager which allows a subject matter expert to make the mappings between data types from different applications themselves, without any programming knowledge. The data types used by any two applications are first exposed by their respective adapters in PetrisWINDS Enterprise, and shown side-by-side in the Semantic Manager screen. The subject matter expert can then connect ‘like-with-like’ across the two data sets by simply pointing and clicking.