Software Agents—An Emergent Software Technology That Enables Us To Build More Dynamic, Adaptable, and Robust Systems
Einar Landre, Jørn Ølmheim, Geir Owe Waersland, Harald Rønneberg · SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition · 2006
Abstract The oil and gas industry need to improve operational efficiency, and to address more demanding government issued requirements with respect to environmental safety in vulnerable areas such as the artic north. These requirements drive for new IT solutions, solutions not possible to implement using the more traditional approaches to software development. These new solutions must be able to sense the environment, make decisions without human intervention, and involve humans when needed. In the latter situation the software can be used to prioritize problems that need human attention and assist the human in making better decisions with respect to the available information and situation at hand. Software agents provide the capabilities needed to build the necessary IT systems, and they have during the last 15 years been applied successfully in safety critical systems such as military target prioritization [9] and space shuttle operation [10]. Less dramatic solutions involve optimization of air field runways and scheduling of transport capacity in terms of ships and vehicles. To explore the capabilities of software agents, Statoil has implemented several demonstrators addressing problems in constraint-based planning and business process support. In this paper we will present how software agents can be used to improve decisions in core oil industry processes such as drilling, production, processing and operation & maintenance. The main focus will be the on production, processing and operation & maintenance as these three processes can be directly supported by the same software agents. Drilling must be supported by another set of agents because drilling operations are conducted during a different phase of the development using different infrastructure. An interesting observation from our own prototyping effort illustrated in figure 3 is that the three processes production, processing and operations & maintenance can be supported by less than 10 software agents in its initial outline. This is as expected, according to Dr. Ronnquist, and illustrates the power of software agents as a software design tool [11].