"The key reason we chose MatrikonOPC
was that no other OPC driver was as
robust as theirs. Implementation went
smoothly and MatrikonOPC’s
support desk was valuable."
Thomas Schmid
Head Application Software Development
for Intelligent Production
Petroleum Development Oman (PDO)
Operators, maintenance personal, engineers and others use the archived data to monitor, control, optimize, and analyze well performance.
Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) is the premier hydrocarbon exploration and production company in the Sultanate of Oman. Using a standard communication protocol, PDO integrated a real-time communication architecture enabling them to collect and move data from oil wells and other facilities to a Process Historian. Operators, maintenance personal, engineers and others use the archived data to monitor, control, optimize, and analyze well performance.
Integrating Multi-Vendor Control Systems
As PDO’s operation evolved, new and disparate control systems including Remote Terminal Units (RTU), Remote Pump Controllers RPC), Intelligent Electronic Devices (IED) and Fieldbus Control Systems were integrated into PDO's standard IP Real-time Architecture. An issue that quickly surfaced was that the communication protocol used by the different devices varied, a common problem encountered by many integrators. For example, many RTUs used Modbus; however, PDO has over 1,000 remote Beam Pump wells that communicate with the RPC (Remote Pump Controller) using a legacy Baker protocol. Traditionally the solution to interface these different protocols with applications would be to develop proprietary drivers. This alone is very expensive and time intensive not to mention the testing, integration and debugging also needed. Consequently, PDO decided to use OPC, a published communication standard, as their