Cloud-Edge-Device Synergy Enables Smart Development of the Oil and Gas Industry

Deng Yantao

Expert of the Oil & Gas Sector

At present, the energy sector is going through a revolution. If the oil and gas industry is to keep up with such rapid transformation, it needs to dynamically upgrade and create value by leveraging digital technologies like cloud computing, IoT, big data, AI, and 5G.

Currently, oil companies are building physical and virtual resource pools that are centrally managed, optimized, and automatically allocated based on the development requirements of core enterprise services. They are also applying large-scale physical computing resources to develop the environment for intelligent data processing and analysis applications.

However, the oil and gas industry must still further integrate digital technologies to realize digital transformation and intelligent development. This will aid in boosting reserves and production, improving quality and efficiency, and reducing carbon emissions. Cloud and AI-based tech, for instance, will play a critical role in fulfilling these goals.

Cloud: A unified, centralized, and elastic cloud foundation should be established for the centralized deployment, integration, and application sharing of core service systems. A standardized and maintenance-free cloud application environment should be provided to improve the efficiency of application deployment and O&M. On top of the cloud foundation, a unified, open, and standard oil and gas data platform as well as a universal, open, and scalable AI platform should be deployed. This will provide centralized data services and intelligence for the cloud foundation, enabling it to better serve various businesses.

Edge/Device side: There is a demand for using sensing, interconnection, and data convergence to realize real-time supervision, intelligent diagnosis, automatic processing, and intelligent optimization for oilfield production and crude oil refining.

In this regard, Huawei offers end-to-end solutions, including (1) infrastructure as a service (IaaS) such as computing, storage, and network, (2) a unified cloud platform with the oil and gas data platform and AI platform built on it, and (3) platforms that help customers realize intelligent exploration, drilling, production, collaborative research, and intelligent decision-making. In addition, through cloud-edge-device synergy, Huawei trains and delivers algorithms on the cloud to execute computing and intelligent diagnosis/processing on the device side and edge side, greatly improving the response speed and production efficiency.

Benefits provided by Huawei to customers:

• Data enablement : Huawei helps customers break data silos, build a centralized data platform, and solve issues encountered in collaboration between scientific research and production. It allows customers to realize large-scale data calculation and sharing, and supports comprehensive online research in fields like exploration, development, engineering, reserves, and mining rights, greatly improving exploration efficiency.

• AI enablement :ModelArts can complete model training tasks with high precision and efficiency. In addition, Huawei can train massive simulation samples to interpret geophysical data with AI technologies, helping experts improve work efficiency. Take Huawei's AI-based seismic interpretation based on ModelArts as an example; during research, this solution reduces the time required for interpreting seismic layers and faults from months to a few hours. Moreover, it helps promulgate previous expert experience to facilitate underground oil and gas reservoir research, oilfield production, and intelligent decision-making.

• Application enablement Huawei offers high-performance computing clusters and massive storage systems to improve computing and storage performance, allowing enterprises to focus more on their core services. Application integrated on the cloud as well as cloud-native applications improve seismic data accuracy, enabling further breakthroughs in oil exploration and development businesses.

The petroleum industry is undergoing a revolution brought by the digital wave. In relation to this, oil and gas exploration has always been an ideal sector to test emerging technologies. Tech such as high-performance computing, cloud, and AI will play an important role in improving the efficiency and precision of exploration and development, shortening the exploration period, increasing the success rate of well exploration, and minimizing operational risks.

We believe that digital technologies will become widely applied to oil, gas, and new energy fields in the future. We can greatly improve energy consumption efficiency through data collision and algorithm training. We can develop more intelligent and functional applications on IT systems with cloud-edge-device synergy and linkage for the oil and gas and energy industry chain. We can make the industry more intelligent and bring oil and gas exploration into a new era.

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