A Hybrid Test Environment for Verification of Drilling Automation Systems

The transition towards drilling automation put high demands on new software for controlling or assisting during drilling. Along with the software development, adequate infrastructures for testing and verification of this software need to be in place. In other industries, such as aviation, the development of advanced simulators goes hand in hand with the technological developments and ensures a fit for purpose test environment at all time. Since 2017, a high-fidelity online drilling simulator has been available to the public. The purpose has been to facilitate and accelerate the development and testing of real-time drilling automation systems. The simulator can be accessed through a web Application Programming Interface (API) and run from a web client, or in a Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulator from a control system environment with programmable logic controllers (PLCs) from leading industry vendors. To facilitate testing and verification of systems also on real data, recent developments have enabled a user-friendly access to openly available drilling data through the web API. Automatic functions have been developed to create model configurations from recorded data sets. This setup enables benchmarking of simulation models against recorded data and allows efficient verification of drilling automation systems. The web enablement makes the infrastructure suitable for development projects and software verification from anywhere in the world without any installation needed. Better availability of realistic and scalable test environments for automated drilling systems is expected to speed up the qualification of new drilling technologies. This will in turn reduce costs and minimize the carbon footprint from drilling operations. This paper describes the hybrid test environment and key learnings from the developers and user's perspective.