Facility Composition and Facility Connection

• A facility can be composed of other facilities. Facilities can have connectors and these can be connected in a time dependent manner.

• When facilities are composed of any other facilities, the relationship must be defined using the Facility_Composition class.

• Utilizing the facility composition mechanism represents the fact that a facility is composed of a number of other facilities. This will show what a larger facility is composed of, but will not show the nature of the connection. For example, if it is required to show that a BOP stack is composed of an annular BOP, ram type BOP, and spools and adapters, and then the Facility_Composition mechanism should be used. Furthermore, a well control system can be composed of a BOP stack (whose composition is defined as above), an accumulator unit, and a choke and kill manifold. Another example of using facility composition is to describe a rig as being composed of mud pumps, mud pits, shale shakers, etc.

• The facility connection mechanism provides two methods to define the nature of the connections between two facilities. These two mechanisms, which are not mutually exclusive, are as follows.

If the user just wants to define two facilities that are connected to each other, and either there is no information regarding the connectors or this information is of no interest, then Facility_Connection can be used by instantiating the two relationships (From_Facility and To_Facility) to the two subject facilities.

However, if the information regarding the connectors is available and is of interest to the user, the other two relationships (From_Connector and To_Connector) should be instantiated. As mentioned above, these two methods are not mutually exclusive, but care should be taken as this may lead to a data inconsistency.

• Typical examples of using Facility_Composition and Facility_Connection in drilling are defining the BHA, drill string, casing string composition, and the connection between the individual components.

• Facility_Connection and Facility_Composition are time dependent in that they have a start time and an end time. This allows the composition of a facility to be tracked over time.