Despite renewed interest and recent advancements, there remains a real need for technology roadmaps to help guide, focus, and even unify the industry's efforts in all aspects of drilling automation to improve rig safety and performance efficiency. Such roadmaps could identify current states of relevant technologies, generate long-range views of where they could or should be in the future, and suggest viable paths between the two states for each technology. The primary purpose of this paper is to create a series of drilling automation roadmap frameworks using a newly develop ternary chart technique that graphically depicts relationships among the three fundamental automation components.
Rigsite manpower, automated rig equipment, and remote connectivity are the three automation components that are often discussed independently, but seldom as an integrated set. While each has its own set of benefits, costs, issues, and risks, an important premise of this paper is that balance amongst the three is central to drilling automation success. Previously, automation in general has commonly been described as a binary relationship involving computers and humans where each makes all decisions on opposite ends of a "level-of-automation" scale.
Scenarios for each of the six segments in the drilling domain are presented to highlight major shifts in technology, requirements for new technologies, and decision-making directives to serve specific needs. Segment-specific roadmaps are illustrated using the ternary chart technique.
