Done-in-minutes integration between OSIsoft process-historian “web parts” and Esri geo-spatial system web parts demonstrates the benefits of the nascent Microsoft Upstream Reference Architecture (MURA), said speakers at last week’s OSIsoft user conference held in downtown San Francisco. Web parts are fundamental component building blocks used in Microsoft’s wildly popular SharePoint portal.

For upstream operations and engineering, the significance is that the integration enables an interface for quick, intuitive information retrieval. In the scenario demonstrated at the event, a user in a web-based portal environment starts with a geo-spatial model, pinpointing a concern such as a piece of equipment, then uses search to find related structured and unstructured materials, and finally taps predictive analytics to support short- and long-term decision making.

It is generally recognized that the upstream oil and gas industry needs better, more “unified” interfaces. The MURA group’s Initiative’s success in bringing together 29 software vendor partners, systems integrators, standards bodies and industry service companies -- including Halliburton and Schlumberger -- is expressive of that need. Owner-operators BP, Chevron, Pemex and Shell are also involved to varying degrees. “This is not a static organization,” said Marcel Badart, strategic alliance manager, Esri, the vendor of geo-spatial solutions.

OSIsoft, with its PI System, is well known as a process-historian and real-time information management vendor. Throughout its 30 years of existence, OSIsoft has been committed to incorporating Microsoft infrastructure and innovations into its own technology. For that reason, another discussion topic at the event were what OSIsoft plans to make of Microsoft’s recently introduced StreamInsight, which allows complex-event processing of in-flight data.


Same Question, Different Answers


As an initiative, MURA is dedicated to the collective formulation of a generally recognized architecture that allows cost-effective integrations. “This is important because all projects are integration,” said Badart.

If it’s true, as another speaker at the MURA session said, that when it comes to IT, the questions are always the same but the answers always different, then MURA’s answers are about “interoperability -- the sharing of both data and functionality – in a web environment,” said Craig Harclerode, OSIsoft O&G industry manager.

At this point, it’s more accurate to refer to MURA as a set of principles rather than a fully specified architecture. Ticking off the principles involved may sound to the educated generalist like a mind-numbing cascade of ever-changing IT marketing terms – from service-oriented architecture to cloud computing.

But for industrial IT specialists, adhering to MURA principles already makes possible the “composition of common application components” that with a little tweaking plug-in to the architecture and then work together. Tweaking will go away with MURA’s further progress and continuing incorporation of architecture specifications by independent vendors.

The MURA effort has at least several things going for it. A de facto standard backed by a powerhouse like Microsoft often can have more influence than one issued by a standards committee. The architecture won’t conflict and can incorporate industry standards such as PPDM for master data management, as well as Witsml and Prodml for ease of transferring drilling data and production data.

Further, most oil and gas companies already have some kind of operations architecture in place, and many are built on principles similar to MURA’s. Any incremental effort on the part of these companies needed to become MURA compliant will lower interoperability costs and help them achieve consistency across facilities.

A significant benefit of the architecture is achievement of a common interface while leaving existing legacy systems in place and accommodating a wide range of inputs. As is well known, often because of merger & acquisition activity, companies have widely disparate systems in their facilities. A portal environment fits over legacy systems, extracting needed data without persisting it.


Declarative Integrations


The digital oilfield has been around a decade, said Paul Nguyen, global oil and gas industry technology strategist, Microsoft. “But in the last three or four years, with fiber optics replacing satellite and more data coming up the string, real-time, decision-based systems are needed to support those volumes.”

Across the oil and gas industry, Microsoft chose to first devote resources to upstream architecture. It will be followed by similar efforts for the downstream and midstream. In fact, Microsoft is doing this type work across a wide range of industries, including many unrelated to the upstream.

MURA’s approach is both top-down and bottom-up. “It’s top-down in the sense that we’ve taken the Energistics model and translated it into an upstream business architecture with extensions into facility management. It’s bottom-up in that we’ve looked at defined workflow scenarios to see what the industry needs today,” Nguyen said.

In the past, integration “answers” involved custom coding and persisting data in multiple databases. Application programming interfaces, so-called APIs, help some, said Nguyen, but “declarative integration, the use of composite solutions needing zero coding, allows web parts published by OSIsoft to expose what they can use and what they can provide to other web parts. That means ease of connectivity, composite SharePoint solutions and a single view of integrated operations.”

At the event, OSIsoft announced release of I/O adapters for Microsoft StreamInsight. OSIsoft PI itself does complex event processing, but company developers say, for some applications, how StreamInsight queries are written, its all-memory-based performance, and other considerations will make it a preferred method for some users.

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