The Roadmap for Industry Adoption of the PRODML Standard

Abstract The goal of the PRODML1 (Production Markup Language) initiative is to establish an industry standard for data exchange to support production processes within a "digital oil field" (DOF) context. The first efforts used pilots to demonstrate the standard in the form of XML objects and Web services. These showed software applications and databases from multiple vendors could be configured to seamlessly exchange data to partially automate specific production workflows. Subsequent work demonstrated the need for a higher level of interoperability with other standards such as WITSML1 and RESQML1 and for additional capabilities to improve work process automation. Development of an industry standard is difficult, and the challenge is greater when interoperability among multiple industry standards is required. This requirement has forced a higher level of coordination and development planning among standards groups. PRODML standards are now used across a wide range of commercial applications but adoption rates remain low. The PRODML Special Interest Group has developed a roadmap that projects industry adoption of specific capabilities over several years. The roadmap shows the development and delivery of the standard to support three high-level capabilities: surveillance and optimization, industry reporting, and shared asset models. The first aims to partially automate production processes; the second covers data exchange between third parties including service company-to-operating company reporting, regulatory reporting, and operating company-to-non-operating company reporting. The third is a standard set of data management services for managing and finding structured and unstructured data, accomplished by storing hierarchy or relationships of data and a registry of where the data live. This capability can serve as an interface to related standards such as OPC and MIMOSA and be used to integrate production, process control, and business systems. The roadmap has two major phases for PRODML development: industry acceptance and standards-based digital oil field. The initial phase emphasizes the importance of building industry awareness and buy-in of objectives through the use of the standards in commercial applications using the three capabilities. The second phase shows a path toward increased implementation across the industry in which PRODML will ultimately be the industry standard for production data exchange.