Ignition Edge, Perspective, and MQTT for 1,000 Wells

The project was started to replace KODA Resources’ legacy poll/response SCADA system for an upstream oil & gas company. The existing servers were out of warranty and support. The solution was to develop an IIOT-ready SCADA system on virtual machines that would support MQTT and the company’s desire to use data to drive the business. The field is very diverse, with approximately 1,000 wells producing both oil and natural gas through a variety of different RTU/PLC platforms, and has been around since the 1950s.

PROBLEM:

The project solved a multitude of problems. The physical servers were out of date, warranty, and support. There were six servers in total to run the field. The existing polling engine was built by a software company that has been out of business for more than 5 years and has not offered any support/upgrades since.

This system is critical to upstream oil and gas as it provides not only real-time data, but historical data as well. This historical data includes EFM records for Production, Accounting and Finance, and minute records for gas-plunger applications so operations can optimize their plunger lift operations.

GE IGS was used to buffer data between the polling system, field PLCs, and the HMI. This approach was slow, hard to understand, and provided multiple approaches for multiple devices in the field.

GE iFix was used to provide an HMI. The HMI was extremely slow, inefficient, and built on old HMI standards that were no longer relevant and hard to explain/train on for incoming employees.

The biggest issue was wanting to develop an MQTT-driven system, but not having the budget to replace/add on to 850 field devices.

SOLUTION:

Virtual machines were used to provide flexibility in size, location, performance, etc. The change was made from six physical servers to three virtual machines.

AUTOSOL ACM was used to replace the legacy poll/response system as a starting point to cover all legacy RTUs that required EFM and plunger records to be captured.

MQTT Transmission, Distributor and Engine modules were used to:

• Port data from the ACM server into a unified namespace and publish via MQTT into the Ignition platform.
• Provide one protocol, in a unified namespace that KODA could build on for the future.
• Provide the ability (if needed) to keep the polling engine in the field data center for better reliability and bandwidth efficiency, and place the HMI in the cloud.

Ignition Perspective was used as an HMI. This solved a multitude of problems and future-looking items:

• The speed is what would be expected from a web-based platform. 
• High-performance HMI standards were used and the benefits in training and understanding were seen immediately.
• The flexibility and ease of connecting the database, tag data, and historical data (both real-time Ignition history and previously mentioned RTU-generated plunger history) made screen-building easy.
• The combination of the database connectivity, the unified namespace, and the Perspective parameters (from the view up to the session) have been impressive.
• Perspective has also pushed KODA along in digital transformation by eliminating multiple saved and emailed daily reports and making them dashboards or tables in Perspective that are real-time and can be saved if needed.

KODA has begun a mobile solution for its executive team that has provided many easy look-ins during meetings and important events.

RESULTS:

The server performance is much improved, compared to what KODA had before. It went from hesitancy to restart an old physical machine, to top-of-the-line, easily adjusted VMs.

The new ACM polling system is a big improvement. The communication percentage has gone up from the legacy system and data reliability has gone up exponentially.

Building the entire system on MQTT, with a unified namespace, has been a huge benefit. KODA was able to complete the cutover to the new system with minimal impact to operations. And from there, KODA has started enabling edge MQTT devices and working through those details. The first project, which was popular with operators, was bringing in facility alarms in real time. The second project, much to the automation team’s benefit, was enabling the MQTT in XetaWave radios to publish internal radio diagnostics in real time.

Perspective was very easy to work with. KODA templated its field devices, created a unified namespace, and with the features built into Perspective, built a web- and mobile-based platform for a 1,000-well oil and gas field in less than 100 screens (including embedded analog indicators, etc.). Operators really like the quick navigation and the web-based nature of being able to scroll through multiple wells on their route in half the time it used to take them in the old system.

KODA developed an MQTT-based system by putting Ignition Edge with MQTT Transmission on the same server as AUTOSOL ACM. This gave all the tags in MQTT Engine — in a unified namespace — and allowed KODA to complete the project in six months, instead of completing field work to update every device to support MQTT.

With this design, KODA has enabled MQTT devices without the operators even noticing there was a change (other than faster data).