Devon Energy
Devon Energy is an independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company based in Oklahoma City OK. Devon operates in the Anadarko, Delaware, Eagle Ford, and Rocky Mountain regions. Devon Energy's national assets are supported by a privately constructed and managed SCADA and radio communications network.
At Devon I worked on the 9th floor in production automation. My summer project involved automating the detection of remote field device and radio tower connections. This meant automatically determining the communication status of every radio tower in the field and intelligently displaying this information, along with dynamically building a representative hierarchy of this communication infrastructure and its relationship to field devices and wellpads.
Tools Used During the Internship
Devon uses the .NET stack for all internal software. The tools I used were client APIs for the automation & SCADA platform CygNet and AVEVA PI, a data historian. Additionally, since I was interested in networking and radio tower information, I used the solarwinds API.
Tools used During my Summer 2024 Internship
C#, CygNet, and solarwinds were used for dynamically associating remote field devices with their nearest radio tower, and determining the network status of every radio tower.
Powershell and AVEVA's PI Asset Framework were used for building the visual hierarchy which combined the radio tower information with wellpad and remote device assets.
Finally, the networking information associated with each remote device or wellpad placed in PI Asset Framework was visualized with AVEVA PI's PI Vision.
C# Software Architecture
This block diagram shows a very rough outline of how the first part of my C# program -- responsible for automatic detection and association of radio towers with every remote device in CygNet -- works.
First the program pulls a list of remote devices down from CygNet and gathers their IPs. Then, it performs a trace route to each device, pulling out all responses and their DNS names. These names are matched with a list of Devon's radio towers pulled from Solarwinds, which are checked separately for their communications status.
Finally, the nearest radio tower and its communication status are pushed back up to the CygNet record for each remote device. This provides the SCADA system with accurate and up to date information regarding the communication status of every devices nearest node and most critical node in Devon's field network.Measurement and Automation Infrastructure
The production SCADA team at Devon maintains, monitors, and deploys measurement and automation equipment to all of Devon's operating areas. These cabinets contain PLC's and flow meters which control and disperse production data like line pressures, temperatures, tank levels, alarms and automated set points.
Radio Tower Infrastructure
Devon Field Networking Cabinet
On the left is a typical networking cabinet that corresponds to any single radio tower. It helps bring the SCADA data from the field on to network and into databases or production models. On the right is one of Devon's largest radio towers.
Radio Tower Networks
For IP and security reasons, I can't show unblurred images of Devon's radio network. I'm including these two images from the Delaware to give a sense of the scale and remoteness of these networks.
Remote Device Ping and Radio Tower Status
These (blurred) images are from the final visual representation of networking infrastructure based on my projects automated associations of remote devices and radio towers, made using AVEVA PI's visualization tools. On these pages, an operator, engineer, or business professional can select a radio tower and view all devices that communicate primarily with that tower. This page can be used to discern outages or bottlenecks, and determine whether they have to do with the network itself or individual wellpads and devices.
