Speaking at a Franco-Norwegian ‘Digital competences’ event in Paris earlier this year, Wim Van Wassenhove introduced Billington Process Technologies’ (BPT) new Common fluid connector protocol (CFCP). The protocol is designed to fill a gap in ‘digital twin’ style high fidelity simulator applications which currently make it hard to deploy best in class, rigorous simulation tools in a real-time environment. A proof of concept involved the exchange of well production data between simulators (Petro-SIM, UniSim, HySys), flow assurance tools (OLGA, LedaFlow) and training simulators (K-Spice, Indiss, Yokogawa). These can be driven from BPT’s Excel add-in, allowing engineers to develop extra functionality in a familiar framework.
The CFCP socket connects fully compositional tools using first principle thermodynamics. The approach will allow oil and gas users to develop or improve in-house solutions as alternatives to ‘packaged proprietary solutions.’ BPT provides the CFCP on top of Prediktor’s APIS Foundation for real-time data management. APIS provides a set of field-proven APIs and ‘best-in-class’ OPC-UA gateway performance. The solution allows operators to ‘make smarter use of plant as well as predicted data, either in the cloud or on-premises.’ Ultimately, the solution will deliver a combination of proven components, cloud-based data storage and a set of API’s for connectivity.
BPT CEO Per Billington told Oil IT Journal, ‘As larger companies develop digital ecosystems, we see this as an opportunity for a practical solution that helps the digitalization processes and improves operational efficiency. Our solutions help with plant integrity and provide key operational limits to plant management and analytic systems. The plant data exposed through CFCP will be available to anybody with the right access privileges. We also see the CFCP data as a better source of information for artificial intelligence and machine learning systems than the raw plant data alone. We completed our proof of concept using internal funding. The next step is to launch a pilot with one or more operators on a live plant. We would welcome an initiative from any plant operator.’
As we reported last year, Statoil is to leverage the OPC-UA communications standard in its ‘OneIMS’ initiative. OneIMS represents a unified way of accessing operational data from different assets from enterprise systems, with a standard protocol and stand data semantics. Prediktor’s Apis platform will act as the OneIMS OPC-UA gateway, with standards such as S95, Prodml and Witsml mapped to the OPC-UA semantic model. More from BPT.
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