Petroleum Development Oman Uses MatrikonOPC to Connect Field Devices to Multi-Vendor Applications

“The key reason we chose MatrikonOPC was that no other OPC driver was as robust as theirs. Implementation went smoothly and EMI’s support desk was valuable.”
Thomas Schmid
Head Application Software Development for Intelligent Production Petroleum Development Oman (PDO)

PDO integrated a real-time communication architecture using a common communication protocol, allowing them to gather and transport data from oil wells and other facilities to a Process Historian. The stored data is used by operators, maintenance personnel, engineers, and others to monitor, manage, optimize, and evaluate well performance.

Integrating Multi-Vendor Control Systems
As PDO’s operation evolved, new and different control systems including Remote Terminal Units (RTU), Remote Pump Controllers RPC), Intelligent Electronic Devices (IED) and Fieldbus Control Systems were integrated into PDO’s standard IP Real-time Architecture. The fact that the communication protocols utilized by the various devices differed immediately became apparent, a challenge that many integrators experience. Many RTUs, for example, utilize Modbus; however, PDO has over 1,000 remote Beam Pump wells that utilize the older Baker protocol to connect with the RPC (Remote Pump Controller). Traditionally the solution to interface these different protocols with applications would be to develop proprietary drivers. This in and of itself is highly costly and time consuming, not to mention the testing, integration, and debugging that is required. As a result, PDO chose OPC as its data communication architecture, which is a public communication standard.

They were able to readily interface their devices with multi-vendor client applications as a result of this choice, attaining genuine interoperability.

Because PDO did not have to rip-and-replace anything, the choice to migrate to OPC prolonged the life of its existing control and communication assets. PDO had to gather data from over 1,000 Beam Pumps scattered across the country.

Thomas Schmid, Head Application Software Development for Intelligent Production in PDO, chose MatrikonOPC as the vendor to provide the plug and play drivers. Using the OPC Server for Modbus and the MatrikonOPC Server for Baker, Schmid’s integration team easily interfaced the RTUs, RPCs, IEDs and Fieldbus Control Systems to multiple client applications including Field Ware, a well monitoring and optimization package, and Shurooq Production Web Portal. Each application was OPC compatible, including the centralized OSI PI Process Historian, allowing it to connect with the MatrikonOPC server. In other words, anytime a client application made a request to the server, the MatrikonOPC Server would translate the Modbus and Baker protocols into the standard OPC protocol and send the data as OPC.

So far, 4,000 points have been connected, with updates every 30 minutes, and plans are in the works to raise the number of points to 12,000 in the near future.

A standards-based OPC communication infrastructure was used to integrate the various data collection systems.