Decision support in the automated future: an analysis from the rig site

The oil and gas industry is moving towards automating the drilling process, and a lot of research and practical experiments are performed to achieve this. In this paper, the hypothesis “Automation of the drilling process will eliminate the need for online decision support” is investigated. This is an interesting hypothesis to investigate as it is a common hypothesis in the drilling community. The investigation is based on an analysis of the drilling process, literature about situation awareness, decision support and automation in the oil and gas drilling industry. The analysis shows that with increased automation, the situation awareness of the drillers is reduced, and thus the need for decision support systems that can enhance the situation awareness is increased.