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Information Technology is the most effective tool
for increasing efficiency of processes and for cutting costs on long term. It is increasingly felt by companies across
the world cutting across size, segment and span of operations that I.T. is not
an end but means to improve the bottom-line of business. The
success of Wal-Mart is a shining example of a so-called old economy service
firm, becoming number one in ‘Fortune’ list by cohabitating with new economy
i.e., aggressive use of I.T. tools to increase shelf movement and reduce
inventory, storage and movement costs.
In ONGC, heavy investments are being
made in I.T. penetration. Even earlier,
there have been many attempts such as SCADA for capturing, storing, retrieving and controlling information from systems,
processes and machines. All
well-data is stored painstakingly in magnetic media. Data processing centers of ONGC have Super
computers, which aid ONGC in decision-taking and formulation of policies related
to zones and reservoirs. We are also now proud owner of ‘virtual 3D centre’ for
seismic studies.
An area where I.T. has not penetrated
to any extent is the well-sites scattered across the onshore projects. Except for wireless voice communication and
unreliable PSTN dial-up rural lines, there is no point of access for persons
deployed in such places. In a typical
on-shore field, at least 40% of manpower time is spent in just manually
checking the wells one-bye-one, i.e., simple patrolling. In at least 25% of artificial list wells
surveyed during patrolling, the SRPs/SCPs would be found tripped, and the crew
would diagnose and rectify the fault. In
many cases, the cause would be tripping of fuses, slippage of V-belts, tripping
of contactors conducting current to the motors, etc.
The only point of revenue to ONGC
being oil and oil-products, any incremental gain in oil production by reducing
the downtime of such oil-wells by even 50% would result in incremental gain in annual revenues exceeding the capital costs
incurred in providing I.T. infrastructure at such places. i.e., the pay-back
period will not be more than one year.
For comparison purpose, it can be submitted that Inventory Management
system IMMS has resulted in inventory reduction by around 30-40%. However, inventory costs of ONGC are only a
fraction of total costs and therefore the contribution to bottom-line is not
very significant. Of course, such I.T.
penetration at offices have helped in acceptance of I.T. tools by almost all sections of
employees cutting across age group, education level and skill-level, in
addition to providing motivation to employees and providing a better working
ambience, in addition to providing on-line, speedier MIS data access to Management.
The problem in providing connectivity
to these remote well-sites to the nearest access point, which is typically a
GGS or CTF is that it is not possible to
wire them. The use of wireless digital technology is the only
option for connecting these well-sites.
With the improvements in reliability, security and reduction in cost of
embedded devices, embedded operating systems, use of web-technologies such as
XML in even such embedded systems make
it attractive to provide embedded
systems at these well-sites which would communicate to the nearby access
point through TCP/IP for control,
data retrieval and even for voice.
Broadband
fixed wireless technologies have matured, are less costly today, very reliable
and with low operating costs. Typically, bandwidth
bottleneck is caused by transition from LAN to WAN environment that has
traditionally used relatively low throughput, expensive, difficult-to-configure
interfaces. Wireless digital technology can seamless integrate LAN/WAN through
high-performance, cost-effective solutions.
Since last one decade, Wireless
T1 links (1.5Mb) using spread spectrum technology have proven their
in-service performance for a wide range of applications. These do not require user license, operate in reliable 2.4Ghz/5.8Ghz ISM bands and are
completely unaffected by rain or snow. Now,
with terrific increase in bandwidth requirement, wireless links with DS-3 WAN capacity
(up to 45Mb) are also available in user-friendly bands.
The mantra now being ‘everything IP’ and ‘everywhere backbone’, wireless WAN
with higher throughput, speed and ease of deployment, are easier to
manage/configure and even cheaper now.
Carrier class IP WAN supports continuous full duplex application with no restriction on simultaneous
upstream and downstream bandwidth.
Wireless LAN (WLAN) are usually
implemented as final link between existing wired network and group of client
computers to users who are mobile and roam typically at distances of up to 500 M. These are also simple,
fast and easy to install. Total cost
ownership is again significantly lower since there are no direct costs of
cabling and their maintenance. These are
highly scaleable up to full
infrastructure LANs capable of supporting thousands of users. The most common technology is spread spectrum
that consumes more bandwidth but assures high reliability, integrity and
security. DSSS(Direct Sequencing Spread Spectrum) and FHSS(Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum) are the two technologies
presently available, and DSSS is more popular.
Other cheaper technology option is narrowband technology that uses
radio-transmission systems on one specific frequency. The frequency is kept
narrow to minimize cost through simple radio design. However, these have
limited range, reliability and security and therefore not suited to the application
intended. Similarly, Infra-red
technology is for very short distances and requires that there are no obstacles
in between. This is also not suitable for intended application.
Though at first glance it might look
that since wireless digital waves literally go in air, it is very easy for
eavesdropping, it is not so. A WLAN solution can support multiple layers of security. Domain authentication using user
login/password is the first security gate. Additionally, WEP (Wired Equivalent
Privacy), a standards-based security protocol may also be enabled. Further
security layers such as access point locking, scrambling data using encryption algorithm
etc. are also possible.
An embedded system is ‘embedded’ or
built into something else, usually a non-computing device, and which has a
specific function, viz. to control a system, or display etc. Computing tasks of
these embedded systems could range from acquiring or transferring data about
the work done by a mother device to displaying information or controlling the
mother device. A typical embedded system
usually consist of VLSI specifically built for the purpose, an embedded O.S.
and specific application. Two popular development environments that are used to
develop applications for hardware used in embedded systems are ‘inferno’ and ‘chai’.
Inferno is portable across any platform and any OS. It has its own
microkernel also; i.e., doesn’t require underlying native OS Its memory
requirement is as low as 1MB.’Chai’ is based on java technology. Core of this technology is a virtual machine,
‘ChaiVM’, which runs on top of an embedded device’s hardware and native OS. A small
(200KB) web server called ‘ChaiServer’ can even
provide Web-based interface to access and configure Chai
applications. It supports XML. It can even integrate with Oracle 8i Lite. This DBMS is light-weight and supports all
industry standards such as ODBC, JDBC and SQLJ.
EMBEDDED OS:
Native OS running on the embedded
systems could be ‘Chorus OS’ (offered from Sun Microsystems), JBED, RT-Kernel
(from On-Time), bedded Linux, Minix, Diamond, Turbo Task etc.
For control and monitoring of
equipments installed in well-sites, all the equipments shall be fitted with
sensors and controllers. There are
additional one-time costs involved for these, which are also to be considered
part of I.T. infrastructure. The present
day practice of over-loading all components right from fuses, transformers,
conducting parts and motors so as to provide rugged input to driven equipment is not only
energy-consuming, but suffers from serious limitations of poor reliability and
more runtime maintenance costs.
A better alternative to above is
provision of controllable interfaces to all equipments installed so that these
are controllable from base, and any abnormality is also easily observed by
studying the data transmitted from sensors.
The Application can also be integrated into an XML-formatted data-file,
which can be viewed/ analyzed from any web-enabled device connected to the
network. The IP network can also be used
for voice (full duplex mode) communication between the patrol party and the
base plant using VoIP Devices available plenty in the
market.
AUTHOR’S PROFILE:
Suresh
Naloor, DySE(Electrical) joined ONGC in 1990. He is presently working as
Database Administrator, IMMS in Mehsana Asset. He has
a Electrical and Electronics Engineering degree from