From machine control to drilling control

The complexity of drilling operations is constantly increasing. By changing the perspective of automation from a pure machine control mindset to a drilling control one, it is possible to provide proactive assistance to the drilling crew during drilling operations. This needs to take in use physical models of the drilling process. Such mechanical, hydraulic and heat transfer models are dependent on physical quantities that can be derived from real-time sensors. The correlation between the existing measurements and the physical model parameters needs to be analyzed in order to extract which corrections need to be applied on the measurement to extract the required physical values and whether the total sensory system, at the rig site, is complete and robust.