Modeling a drilling control system, as a Discrete-Event-System

The application of Discrete Event Systems to model a drilling control system is investigated in this paper. Issues in the drilling process include enhancing the drilling performance, and reducing the risk of accidents. The drilling control systems that are in use today were designed to meet earlier requirements which unfortunately do not hold today. Control System engineers meet great difficulties to satisfy new requirements. We argue that those requirements are simply subsets of more general requirements namely, safety, functional scalability and task planning enablement. In this paper we show how a drilling control system can be categorized as a Discrete Event System. We formalize the problem by mapping the drilling control system to the so-called basic transition system. Finally we illustrate through a use case from drilling, how a Petri net model of the transition system satisfies our predefined requirements.