Hub-and-Spoke Architecture Speeds Data Collection

In the late 1990's, a leading oil and gas producer, with interests throughout the eastern hemisphere, acquired an oil company that gave it a majority interest in new oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea.

All process data was locked on a gas platform that was a key part of the acquisition. There was no easy way to bring data on shore for analysis, performance assessment, fault prediction and other review. Without this critical information, the company could not effectively manage the important gas platform asset.

Because satellites were used for communications, transfer rates were slow, expensive and inherently unreliable. Consequently, the oil producer relied heavily on manual data entry and retrieval, and experienced significant human error in the process.

The main problems that prevented them from transporting the data from the platform automatically were unreliable communications, slow data transfer rates and the need to conserve bandwidth. To successfully manage the operation, the company needed a complete overhaul that would eliminate all of the associated problems, but in a cost-effective, scalable and maintainable manner.

After researching the marketplace, the company discovered Hub-and-Spoke, one of the advanced OPC solutions offered by MatrikonOPC, a developer and supplier of OPC software, based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. "After learning about the Hub-and-Spoke architecture, we realized that it addressed every one of the individual problems we were currently facing, including reliability, accuracy, maintainability and affordability," said the project manager who oversaw the implementation of the MatrikonOPC solution.

"Hub-and-Spoke is a solution based on a number of individual OPC technologies," he added. "Its purpose is to reliably move process and business data from remote locations to a central repository. MatrikonOPC’s solutions-based strategy enabled us to select different OPC components to address the specific problem we were facing."

For this project, the key MatrikonOPC technologies used to implement Hub-and-Spoke are: OPC Desktop Historian, OPC Transporter and OPC Tunneller.

The reliability equation

OPC Desktop Historian is used to store all required data, both on the offshore platform and at the company’s onshore data center. It provides the first part of the reliability equation, ensuring that data is always being collected on the platform.

OPC Transporter provides the second part of the reliability equation. It is programmed to regularly send the latest data from the platform to the data centers for both the company and its partners. If the network is unavailable, which happens regularly, OPC Transporter will continue to attempt to send the data until it arrives safely. As an added benefit, data can be sent at non-peak satellite hours, reducing overall costs.

OPC Tunneller is the enabling technology that allows OPC data to flow from the external domain on the platform to both the company’s domain and the domains of its partners at the main control center. Without Tunneller, each domain would need a large DCOM (Distributed COM) security hole to be open, an unacceptable situation for all parties involved.

OPC Data Access (DA) Tunneller is used for real-time data transfer to the partner’s data control center (for distribution to all partners in the project), and OPC Historical Data Access (HDA) Tunneller is used to support Transporter’s historical data transmissions directly to the oil producer’s data center.

In addition to the key Hub-and-Spoke components, MatrikonOPC Data Manager is deployed to exchange data between the different control systems on board the oil platform. The MatrikonOPC Server for iFix human-machine interface (HMI) software from GE Fanuc, is used to collect data directly from the operator workstations.

The project manager added, "Without MatrikonOPC technology, we could not have even started this project. We will definitely turn to MatrikonOPC again for future projects."

For more information about MatrikonOPC and “Hub and Spoke,” visitwww.matrikonopc.com.