Experience transfer for process improvement

The oil well drilling process is the selected representative of a challenging industrial process. The drilling process is becoming more complex as oil fields mature and technology evolves. At the same time, the amount of information is increasing in volume and frequency. Although technology is advancing, failures occur at almost the same rate as before, leading to loss of valuable time. Whenever the process is failing, or running smoothly, valuable experience is gained. To take advantage of established and continually growing new experience a formalized methodology, knowledge intensive case-based reasoning, was applied for capturing of drilling process experience and for reusing it. Experience was collected from different information sources. Structured cases were used to describe failure episodes; its circumstances and how the failure was repaired. A general domain knowledge model supports the case-based reasoning process. It was demonstrated how the system was able to recommend how to solve problems when they arise, while at the same time bridging the gap between new and experienced personnel. Method performance was tested on 62 selected field cases. The system also identified the failure causes of problems and could thereby suggest more effective repair actions. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.