As a global leading ICT solution provider, Huawei is committed to provide the innovation ICT solution, products and services for telecom carriers, enterprises, and consumers. Its eLTE broadband access solution, based on cutting-edge 4G LTE wireless technology, offers the enterprise customers highly integrated small-scale core network, distributed base station and terminal access equipment with the features of flexible networking, high reliability and so on. At the same time, the eLTE solution can be deeply adapted the industry requirements and meet the needs of the emergency network deployment and business applications in the harsh industrial environment, and will bring the brand new possibility for the future diversification applications in industry.
As a professional service supplier, Flame Company provides the integrated operation management service for engineering equipment, technical service for oil drilling engineering, and industry-scale Internet of Thing (IoT) service. In addition, it also offers the petroleum engineering services for oilfield chemistry customized, well logging, directional well, gas drilling and so on.
Nowadays, there are growing needs of wireless full coverage, connected mobile devices, real-time analysis, big data mining, predictive maintenance and so on in oil & gas industry. How to satisfy all above needs becomes a critical challenge to all the solution suppliers. As the technology of 4G communication and real-time data analysis platform becoming mature, SAP, Huawei and Flame find the cooperation opportunity: Via eLTE private broadband network, we can transfer the machine data which is fetched through Flame Data Acquisition Unit and SAP PCo (Plant Connectivity) to the SAP MII on HANA platform. In this way, we can fuse of the Flame Equipment Maintenance and Condition Based Monitor solution (OT) with SAP Enterprise Asset Management (in ERP) solution (IT). With this fusion, the base was provided to implement SAP PdMS (Predictive Maintenance Service) and big data analyst solutions on SAP HANA.
To verify the feasibility and stability of the machine data acquisition solution, SAP GPO PSC (Partner Solution Center) allied with Huawei and Flame to build a test environment in Huawei eLTE laboratory, we simulated the machine data acquisition scenario and the hardware/software included: PLC (SIEMENS SIMATIC S7-300), Flame Data Acquisition Unit (RSDA Drilling Site Data Acquisition Unit FL2000-AA), Huawei eLTE core network (eSCN230), Huawei distributed base station (DBS3900), Huawei CPE, KEPServerEX 5 (OPC Server), SAP MII 15.0 and SAP PCo 15.0.
SAP MII (Manufacturing Integration & Intelligence) is a service-based composition environment (SOA architecture) consisting of Data Services (integrating with the various data sources from shop-floor systems), Business Logic Services, Visualization Services (UI development basing on SAPUI5), Analytic Services, Web Services and so on. In addition, the environment has some pre-defined functionalities, such as OEE (Overall Equipment Efficiency) solution, KPI Framework, PIC Plant Information Catalog model self definition design and so on. The customers can rapidly develop their own solutions based on these functionalities.
SAP PCo (Plant Connectivity) is the next generation of high performance manufacturing connector software. It can connect to the industry-specific standard data sources (i.e. control systems, realtime database systems, SPC systems and so on). PCo agents support the following standardized software interfaces: OPC DA, OPC HDA, OPC A&E, OPC UA, OLE DB, ODBC, Modbus, GE Fanuc Proficy Historian, OSISoft PI, Socket, IP21, Citect, File Monitor Agent.
We tested the connections in three different ways according to the scenarios on the customers’ side are diverse:
- 1. To fetch data from PLCs with multiple models from different manufactures, we use KEPServerEX 5 as the OPC server to connect to all the PLCs. Then we can transfer the machine data to SAP MII with the SAP PCo OPC DA Agent as the bridge between KEPServerEX 5 and MII via Huawei eLTE private network.
- 2. We used SAP PCo Socket Agent connecting to Flame DAU and transferring the data to SAP MII via Huawei eLTE private network when the machine can be connected to Flame Data Acquisition Unit directly. On MII side, we built the transaction logic to parse the socket stream and filter out tag information that can be used to do business analysis.
- 3. The developer from Flame developed the customized connector FlameAgent with data parse for their own data acquisition unit and transferred the data of tag name (i.e. rotate rate, vibration frequency etc. ) to SAP MII via Huawei eLTE private network utilizing SAP PCo SDK toolkit.
The overall architecture is illustrated as following:
Finally, all three connection paths were verified and passed the test. Comparatively, the performance will be better (Especially, it can avoid a lot of network security related issues) if we install OPC Server and SAP PCo on the same physical server. Meanwhile, we can also install SAP PCo into Flame Data Acquisition Unit or Huawei CPE to decrease hardware investment.
This co-innovation solution by SAP, Huawei and Flame provides a wireless full coverage of production, management and operation for oil & gas industry via eLTE broadband private network. With the mobile devices, the field staff not only can use voice trunking dispatch, but also can transfer the site video and production information to the operation management center in real time to improve the efficiency of operation and management. By integrating the data from the site machines, operation management and business management, the production operation information from line of business (i.e. productions, equipment, HSE, logistics etc.) can be transferred to Headquarter to manage the multi-production sites in real time, big data analyst optimization and completely eliminate the operational risks and potential accidents before the happening.
The co-innovated solution will enhance the competitiveness and meet the actual needs of customers since SAP can supply operational management solutions for 11 lines of business in Oil&Gas E&P industry and Huawei can supply cutting-edge 4G wireless broadband network solutions.
