"Without MatrikonOPC technology, we could not have even started this project"
Instrumentation Manager,
Independent Oil Producer
In the late 1990's, a leading oil and gas producer, with interests throughout the eastern hemisphere, acquired an oil company that gave it a majority interest in new oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea.
All process data was locked on a key gas platform that was part of the acquisition. There was no easy way to bring it on shore for analysis, performance assessment, fault prediction, etc.
Because satellites were used for communications, transfer rates were slow, expensive, and inherently unreliable. Consequently, the oil producer relied heavily on manual data entry and retrieval, and experienced significant human error in the process.
The main problems that prevented them from transporting the data from the gas platform automatically were:
- Unreliable communications to the platform
- Slow data transfer rates
- The need to conserve bandwidth
To successfully manage the operation, the company needed a complete overhaul that would eliminate all of the associated problems, but in a cost-effective, scalable, and maintainable manner.
After researching the marketplace, they discovered MatrikonOPC and began investigating some of their advanced OPC solutions. "After learning about the Hub and Spoke architecture, we realized that it addressed every one of the individual problems we were currently facing, including reliability, scalability, accuracy and maintainability", said the Project Manager who oversaw the implementation of the MatrikonOPC solution.
"Hub and Spoke is a solution based on a number of individual OPC technologies" he added. "Its purpose is to reliably move process and business data from remote locations to a central repository. MatrikonOPC's solutions-based strategy enabled us to select different OPC components to address the specific problem we were facing".
In this case, the key MatrikonOPC technologies used were: OPC Desktop Historian, OPC Transporter, and OPC Tunneller.
OPC Desktop Historian was used to store all required data, both on the offshore platform and at the company's onshore data center. It provided the first part of reliability equation, ensuring that data was always being collected on the platform.
OPC Transporter provided the second part of the reliability equation. It was programmed to regularly send the latest data from the platform to the data centers for both the company, and their partners. If the network was unavailable, which happened regularly, OPC Transporter would continue to attempt to send the data until it arrived safely. As an added benefit, data could be sent at non-peak satellite hours, reducing overall costs.
OPC Tunneller was the enabling technology that allowed OPC data to flow from the external domain on the platform to both the company's domain, and the domain of their partners at the main control center. Without Tunneller, each domain would have needed a large DCOM security hole to be open, an unacceptable situation for all parties involved.
OPC DA Tunneller was used for real-time data transfer to the partner's data control center (for distribution to all partners in the project), and OPC HDA Tunneller was used to support Transporter's historical data transmissions directly to the oil producer's data center.
In addition to the key Hub and Spoke components, MatrikonOPC Data Manager was deployed to exchange data between the different control systems on board the oil platform, and the MatrikonOPC Server for iFix HMI was used to collect data directly from the operator workstations.