Raising the efficiency of drilling processes

The offshore drilling industry faces significant uncertainty over its lifecycle regarding the future use context, legal context and technology when drilling systems are conceptualized and offered to customers. Wear and tear and deliveries of deficient or malfunctioning systems are further potential causes for rig and system upgrades. So far those change drivers are rarely accounted for during systems design as, most often, the selling price of those drilling systems is the ultimate decision criteria. As a consequence upgrades are usually performed in operational phases at very high costs or are even deferred due those high costs. Minor and absolutely required changes are usually performed during planned overhauls of those rigs but lack larger changes on the rig that would actually be required. In order to increase lifecycle value for system users, system suppliers must be able to identify high-performing flexible solutions in early phases of system specification and conceptual design at a reasonable time. In this context it is crucial that engineers are supported. This research suggests a methodology for identifying the right flexibility more efficiently.

The drilling industry is an important part of the global and national economy, producing a massive turnover every year, entailing huge investments in facilities and personnel. Consequently, the efficiency and performance of drilling systems play a decisiv e role within the whole value chain in this industry. The drilling industry also deals with a high magnitude of uncertainties during the design of products and layout (system architecture). Whereas other industries (e.g. production engineering) are able t o actively control their surrounding conditions to allow optimum system performance, drilling systems constantly cope with unpredictable events that mostly cannot be controlled. Environmental characteristics (i.e. wind and rig motion) or changes in format ion are only examples that complicate and delay the drilling process, influencing significantly the performance of drilling systems. Due to the complexity of components, their interrelation and fuzzy boundary conditions, drilling systems should be regarde d as extended systems to include uncertainty factors into their design process. By integrating different stakeholders currently separated domains such as drilling (sub-) processes, systems, system components (drilling equipment) and human factors can be understood, mapped and integrated. At the same time relevant context and requirements are to be identified to set the boundary conditions (degrees of freedom) within that framework. The PhD project, in particular, is to deal with how efficient system arch itectures and processes can be generated to minimize the impact of fuzzy boundary conditions. These results are intended to support the layout design of drilling systems as well as their multi-criteria assessment e.g. in terms of maximum value (e.g, cost, safety) and minimum resource consumption (i.e. cost, time).