Software Interoperability for Petroleum Applications

Software Interoperability for Petroleum Applications — In this introduction to the thematic dossier on software interoperability, we emphasise the key role of software for the petroleum industry, and we give market and technical motivations for interoperability. This is followed by a brief overview of the technologies used in the search for interoperability and by a summary of the five technical contributions which constitute the core material in this issue. We conclude by providing some views on the future interoperability challenges in our industry. Software Interoperability for Petroleum Applications Interopérabilité logicielle : les applications dans l’industrie pétrolière D o s s i e r Oil & Gas Science and Technology – Rev. IFP, Vol. 60 (2005), No. 4 1 THE KEY ROLE OF MODERN SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE PETROLEUM INDUSTRY There is little need to emphasize the key role of computers and software for the oil and gas industries. Since the early days of computing, information technologies have been used by petroleum companies for every aspect of their business. Modelling and simulation have been central tools for technical and economical evaluation of assets such as exploration prospects, reservoirs, offshore equipment and transportation systems, refineries and petrochemical plants. The President of a large R&D company for the petroleum industry wrote in 2001 that information technology (IT) “plays a major transverse role for us. In R&D, most research projects make use of modelling technologies and lead to new software. IT is a central element of our business, and contributes to establishing links between various sectors” (translated from Mandil, 2000). In the following, we emphasise a few characteristics of contemporary IT that must be taken into account when developing technical software for the petroleum industry. 1.1 Increasing Complexity An important aspect of software in the oil and gas industry lies in its ever-increasing complexity. It is now well known that software artefacts are among the most complex technical systems built by mankind. Operating a refining complex, processing 3D seismic data, assessing the economic interest of an oil reservoir, all these tasks involve the combination of dozens of different software tools each of them providing only a part of the global functionality required. As an example, the Figure 1 shows the main technical components of a process modelling environment, as defined by the CAPE-OPEN standard (see article by Banks et al., this issue). Such an environment involves many technical functions, e.g. flowsheet management, management and calculation of physical properties, equation solving, optimisation etc., not counting the many user-oriented functions such as GUI1, session management, saving and restoring data etc. The same can be said for other application environments i.e. reservoir simulators, drilling planners, etc. 1.2 Networks, the Internet and Mobility Nowadays computer systems are networked, distributed, and mobile. Beyond the old paradigm of central computing systems, and beyond the more recent paradigm of personal computing, our current systems heavily rely on the availability of networked resources such as databases, workstations, supercomputing facilities, clusters, and of course the internet. The mobile oil and gas industry worker expects to find these resources at his/her fingertips, accessible from anywhere in the world, in the office, at home, on a rig, or in an airport waiting for a flight. 1.3 Evolution of Technologies The software industry has developed new technologies at a very fast pace. Far from the initial monolithic systems of the (1) Graphical User Interface. 588