A CORBA-Based System for the Monitoring of Petroleum Fields

This paper presents the definition and implementation of a CORBA-based system for the distributed monitoring of automated oil wells located in on-shore petroleum fields. Conducted by the automation of industrial processes in the oil and gas area, the development of computational distributed systems, based on emerging middleware technologies and designed to monitor and actuate in such particular domain, has been strongly worldwide stimulated. The monitoring of the oil wells’ behavior can serve as a powerful tool for the oil production analysis and for the verification of the decisions’ correctness made throughout their existence. Since the monitoring system takes part of a larger oil production system with heterogeneous and distributed modules, CORBA and its services provide support for transparent interaction among such modules. The system implemented in this work has the following main goals: to register the individual characteristics associated with the operational process of oil extraction in each automated well of a oil field, and based on this collected and stored information, to provide descriptive and behavioral results in order to make possible an efficient monitoring process and to also supply control procedures. With the purpose of supporting multiple clients’ invocations, the system provides concurrent monitoring, control tasks and data distribution.