IADC DEC Tech Forum – “The One Rig Approach: Driving Peak Performance Through Interoperability”

Meeting & Venue Details

All times listed are central (08:30 Houston / 14:30 UK / 17:30 Dubai).

Abstracts invited for IADC DEC Q2 Tech Forum: “The One Rig Approach: Driving Peak Performance Through Interoperability”

Drilling automation has advanced significantly over the past decade, with closed-loop control systems, real-time analytics and machine learning algorithms increasingly being deployed across well construction operations. However, drilling automation is facing a significant challenge: the inability and/or difficulty to integrate the different systems to act as one high-performing entity. Interoperability is a critical step for the path forward.

Automated drilling systems depend on continuous, reliable and structured data flows among surface equipment, downhole tools, control systems and decision-support platforms. The realization of fully autonomous drilling systems is contingent upon the successful implementation of interoperability and standardized system integration across the drilling stack.

At the operational level, interoperability demonstrably reduces nonproductive time by enabling real-time communication between subsystems, facilitating dynamic optimization and supporting automated decision making at a speed and consistency that manual processes cannot match. Beyond operational efficiency, it affords operators and service companies greater vendor flexibility and meaningful cost reductions by dismantling proprietary ecosystem dependencies, while simultaneously improving system reliability and reducing operational risk through more coherent and predictable data flows.

The industry’s present fragmentation across hardware interfaces, communication protocols and data models represents a set of structural problems that interoperability is uniquely positioned to resolve. Incompatible proprietary systems generate inconsistent, siloed data that undermines real-time decision making, inflates nonproductive time and constrains the deployment of automation and artificial intelligence at scale. Semantic misalignment between vendor platforms, where identical parameters are defined, measured and reported differently across systems, further compromises data quality and erodes the analytical foundations upon which modern well optimization depends.

The consolidation of fragmented, heterogeneous data sources into a clean, consistent and standardized unified data environment reduces latency, enables rigorous cross-well performance benchmarking, and provides the structured, high-fidelity foundation upon which AI and advanced analytics models depend for meaningful and trustworthy outputs. Addressing these challenges requires not only technical standardization but coordinated alignment across the full ecosystem of stakeholders that constitute the drilling value chain.

Technical and commercial imperatives aside, interoperability carries significant implications for the human dimension of drilling operations. By integrating disparate data streams into a single, coherent operational picture, it substantially reduces the cognitive load placed on drilling personnel, thus mitigating decision fatigue, improving situational awareness and enabling better-informed responses to dynamic wellbore conditions. Rather than displacing human judgment, this shift allows drilling professionals to redirect their expertise and attention toward higher-order analytical and innovative tasks, enhancing both individual performance and the broader capacity of the organization to learn and adapt.

The IADC DEC’s Q2 tech forum seeks to establish a rigorous and shared understanding of the current state of data interoperability within the drilling industry, encompassing an assessment of existing contributions, established frameworks and the technical and commercial gaps that remain. Central to the mandate is the collaborative identification of viable strategies, best architectural practices and actionable next steps toward the adoption of open, contractor-neutral, vendor-neutral and standards-based interoperability, an approach that is increasingly recognized as the necessary foundation for the responsible and effective integration of emerging technologies into drilling operations.

To that end, dedicated technical sessions will examine the most suitable automation architectures for enabling seamless integration between interoperable systems, with particular attention to the performance, latency and scalability requirements of closed-loop drilling applications.

The forum will further engage the distinct integration perspectives of drilling contractors, electronic drilling recorder providers, software-as-a-service platforms, operators, equipment manufacturers and data governance bodies, recognizing that durable interoperability solutions must accommodate the operational realities and commercial interests of each. In doing so, this forum will serve as a technical and strategic platform for aligning the protocols, frameworks and implementation pathways necessary to advance the industry toward a genuinely open and integrated digital drilling environment.

Submission deadline is 20 April.

For more information, contact Linda Hsieh, linda.hsieh@iadc.org, +1-713-292-1945, ext 219.

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General Committee meetings are open to participants from all categories of IADC membership. The Chairman may invite non-members to attend when it furthers the interests of the Committee. At the discretion of the Chairman and IADC staff, the meeting or portions of the meeting may be exclusively reserved for drilling contractor members. Meetings will be held at such times and locations as may be selected by the Chairman with the advice of the Committee. For any questions, please contact the IADC Committee Coordinator. IADC Technical Committee meetings are not open to the Press.