Model driven approach for oil & gas information systems and applications integration

Abstract

The need for interoperability is prominent in the industrial enterprise environment. Different information systems and applications that cover the overall range of the industrial infrastructure from the field to the enterprise level need to interoperate. This quest is driven by the enterprise need for greater flexibility. A great number of systems and applications exist in the enterprise industrial environment cover the Computer Integrated Manufacturing model. This model comprises three different levers: the field lever, the plant level and the enterprise level. The field level comprises the applications that are associated with the industrial manufacturing processes. At these levels the industrial field level equipment, such as sensors, and the industrial controllers, such as programmable logic controllers and numeric controllers, are interconnected. The plant and enterprise levels cover applications that are characterized as upper layer applications. The information systems of the enterprise need to interconnect at the level of a plant. Applications supported are for instance enterprise resource planning, order handling or warehouse management. Nowadays most of oil & gas companies have highly developed IT infrastructure helping performing main business tasks. However these companies don't have common rational strategy of their automation. That leads to the lack of integration between purchased software products necessary for various departments. Integration problems are an obstacle to build the company's unified information space. A technology of oil & gas company data integration and tools developed are considered. The proposed technology of integration combines SOA and Model-Driven approaches using branch standard PRODML as a metamodel. The positive moment of this technology: it does not demand company IT structure reorganization and can be implemented step-by-step, when integration tasks appear; it allows accelerating and simplifying information systems and applications integration considerably, also it provides successful information systems progress in the process of oil & gas company improvement.