IADC/SPE 168036

Automated Planning of Procedures for Risk Mitigation and Efficiency

Arthur Molin, TRAClabs Inc. David Kortenkamp, TRAClabs Inc. R. Peter Bonasso, TRAClabs Inc. Debra
Schreckenghost, TRAClabs Inc. Scott Bell, TRAClabs Inc. Kevin Kusy, TRAClabs Inc.

Copyright 2014, IADC/SPE Drilling Conference and Exhibition

This paper was prepared for presentation at the 2014 IADC/SPE Drilling Conference and Exhibition held in Fort Worth, Texas, USA, 4–6 March 2014.

This paper was selected for presentation by an IADC/SPE program committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s). Contents of the paper have not
been reviewed by the International Association of Drilling Contractors or the Society of Petroleum Engineers and are subject to correction by the author(s). The material does not necessarily
reflect any position of the International Association of Drilling Contractors or the Society of Petroleum Engineers, its officers, or members. Electronic reproduction, distribution, or storage of any
part of this paper without the written consent of the International Association of Drilling Contractors or the Society of Petroleum Engineers is prohibited. Permission to reproduce in print is
restricted to an abstract of not more than 300 words; illustrations may not be copied. The abstract must contain conspicuous acknowledgment of IADC/SPE copyright.

Abstract

To effectively manage drilling operations is an enormous challenge. The work must be carefully planned and scheduled, but
unforeseen events may force changes in the plan at any time. An efficient plan of operation is vital to ensure that work is
performed safely and efficiently, that risks are managed appropriately, and that the cost of the operation is controlled.
Maintenance tasks must be performed on schedule; if necessary maintenance tasks are delayed the costs associated can
balloon or health and environmental risks might arise. However, routine maintenance must be scheduled to minimize the
impact on ongoing operations.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is currently pioneering work on using automated planning and
scheduling to manage the work performed during Extra-Vehicular Activities (EVAs) on the outside of the International Space
Station (ISS). These EVAs are the most difficult activities performed by the astronauts on the ISS, and each one is planned to
maximize efficiency and minimize risk. The time available for an EVA is strictly limited both by the life-support system and
human endurance, and every minute must be utilized properly.

NASA is developing a technology for representing procedures, or the tasks that must be performed during the EVA. The
procedures encode the time estimated for the task, the tools and equipment needed, any preconditions for the task to be
performed, and also the state of the system at the end of the task. An automated planner has been developed that can take a
high-level goal plus those procedures, and:

• produce a plan of operation that attains the goal while ensuring the tools and equipment are available when needed,
• ensure limited resources such as oxygen are managed efficiently,
• ensure the safety equipment is not overloaded, and
• ensure that no performance rules are violated.

The system can track the usage of tools and equipment and automatically update inventory databases at the end of the EVA
to represent changes in location, to simplify the beginning of the next EVA. In the event of unforeseen events, the automated
planner can re-plan the remainder of the shift.

This planning technology developed for NASA has potential to improve the safety and efficiency of drilling
operations. Risks associated with safety-critical activities can be reduced by validating the sequencing of these activities to
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ensure there are no missing steps or misconfigured systems that could lead to accidents. Compliance with safety policies can
be improved by modeling these policies as constraints on how drilling activities should be performed. Logistics for drilling
preparation and operations can be improved by automatically deriving the tools and equipment needed based on the tasks to
be performed. This paper will describe the planning approach implemented for NASA, and will identify how that approach
can be used to improve drilling operations.

Introduction  
To effectively manage operations on a complex and remote installation is an enormous challenge. These challenges are faced
by the oil and gas industry on a daily basis, but they are also faced by NASA. NASA operates a space station, the
International Space Station (ISS); this is a manned, artificial satellite in low-earth orbit. Astronauts aboard the ISS must
maintain and operate the vehicle under some of the most challenging conditions imaginable; they are in an inhospitable
environment, with a tenuous resupply chain. We hope that the techniques developed and the lessons learned will be of
interest.

TRAClabs, Inc. has been serving NASA’s Johnson Space Center for the past 20 years, and has been involved in a series of
projects involving efforts to simplify and automate the production, management, and execution of NASA plans and
procedures. This paper outlines some of the history of and current thinking about planning and operations of NASA’s
manned space program.

NASA  Usage  of  Procedures    

NASA naturally comes from an aerospace background, and when the first efforts at manned space flight were underway, the
pattern that they followed was the one developed for experimental air craft. In this model, tasks are specified by procedures,
which are a sequence of operations that must be carried out to achieve the desired goal. As NASA’s operations matured,
procedures evolved but they continued to be used as a critical element in the safe and efficient operation of manned space
vehicles.

In NASA operations, the procedures are used by both the astronauts on-orbit and the flight controllers who are assisting on
the ground. Each team member is trained to use the procedures, which are written in a terse but rigidly controlled format.
Once thoroughly trained on reading these procedures, the use of them becomes second nature. The procedures specify the
steps that must be taken and the order in which they should be taken. A NASA procedure, in general, consists of a sequence
of commands, or things that must be performed, and verifications, or things that must be true in order to safely continue, as
well as notes, cautions, warnings, figures, ancillary tables, and other information that might be critical to the performance of
the procedure. Procedures often have conditional sections, where the operator is directed to perform a section of the
procedure only if the conditional is true. We are describing here the most common form of a NASA procedure; NASA has
other formats that are used in cases where there are complex branching conditions, such as diagnosing a malfunction.

NASA has found these procedures to be essential to carrying out the necessary complex tasks under severe conditions that
are required during manned space flight. During the early manned programs of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, and through
the Space Shuttle missions, these procedures were prepared as paper documents, originally essentially type-written
documents and later using word processing programs such as Microsoft Word. At the start of the International Space Station
(ISS) missions, in 2000, NASA transitioned to managing, delivering and using procedures as electronic documents.
Currently NASA is preparing a new vehicle, called Orion, for manned deep-space missions; the Orion will continue to use
procedures derived from the earlier versions, but will have procedures as fundamentally electronic artifacts. The authors have
been involved in projects to develop the technology to prepare and deliver those electronic procedures, and we have
demonstrated capabilities of the technology for the ISS.
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Extra-­‐ Vehicular  Activities  (EVA)  on  the  International  Space  Station  (ISS)    
The most difficult, most dangerous, and in many ways the most expensive operations that NASA is currently carrying out are
the extra-vehicular activities (EVAs) performed outside of the International Space Station (the so-called “spacewalks”). The
activities are, however, occasionally unavoidable. When they are performed, NASA brings its long experience in planning
and operating safely under difficult and dangerous conditions to bear on the problem, to make the EVAs as safe and as
effective as they can possibly be.

An EVA requires a dedicated team to accomplish its mission safely:

• A minimum of 2 suited astronauts outside of the vehicle,

• One astronaut inside the vehicle primarily responsible for controlling the Space Station Remote Manipulator System
(SSRMS), the robotic arm that can position crew members and equipment outside of the ISS,
• A flight controller in Mission Control Center (MCC) in Houston, TX, called the EVA Flight Controller, who is
responsible for tracking the progress of the procedure, checking off completed steps, and prompting the EVA
astronauts with their next steps,
• A “front room” team of flight controllers who are the immediate assistants to the EVA Flight Controller, and
• A “back room” team in another area of the MCC to answer complicated questions or issues that require research
from the astronauts or the front room team.

The EVAs were fairly common during the years of primary construction of the ISS; in 2007 there were as many as 20 space
walks (many of which were initiated from the Space Shuttle, but the major elements are the same). Most of these were
essentially “one-off” tasks, unique or at least very uncommon projects. As the ISS has reached completion the EVAs are now
more related to routine maintenance, replacement of equipment reaching end-of-life, and installation of experiments that
require equipment outside the ISS. As the vehicle ages, the maintenance, replacement, and repair will become a bigger
element in the task list. These operations are more routine and are similar to other recent EVAs. In 2013, there were 3 EVAs,
two of them “planned” and one “unplanned.” The unplanned EVA was in response to an ammonia leak, but even in this case
there was a two-week window between the decision to perform the EVA and the EVA itself. NASA does have plans to
perform a truly emergency EVA with essentially no prior notice, but to date the contingency has not arisen and mission
planners regard it as remote.

When an EVA is scheduled, the work is planned out to maximize the efficiency of the work. An EVA requires a substantial
amount of preparation, and obviously imposes significant costs and risks, and also has strict limits on duration due to both
physical capacity of the life-support equipment and the human capabilities of the suited astronauts. Thus, every available
minute is valuable and planning is performed to maximize the work. Generally speaking the EVA will have a set of critical
tasks, and then another set of tasks that are called “get-aheads;” these get-aheads are typically things that could be postponed
but would save time later if they could be performed earlier. The EVA will thus be assembled out of blocks of elements that
are more or less common, some that are repeated essentially identically for every EVA, and others that might be unique. We
are currently working on automated systems to improve the ways these tasks are assembled into a complete procedure; more
on that below.

Current  approach  to  planning  EVA  

Currently, the approach to planning an EVA is as follows. First, the ISS has a system called the Onboard Short-Term Plan
(OSTP), which shows the planned operations in the ISS over the following 2 weeks or so. A scheduled EVA will appear on
the OSTP as a simple block of time reserved without any further decomposition. There will be a list of critical tasks, those
tasks that necessitate the EVA; there will also be a list of less-critical tasks that would be useful to accomplish if possible,
which are called the get-ahead tasks.

Well in advance of the EVA the team responsible for planning the EVA will have been at work. The team will initially
develop a skeleton of the plan, using a 3D graphical representation of the outside of the ISS called the Dynamic On-board
Ubiquitous Graphics, or DOUG. DOUG allows them to map out the necessary traversals from the station air lock to the
various required work sites, identifying safety concerns and hand-holds as they go. An "increment" team will develop a
proposed plan that includes all of the critical elements, and will identify slack time that could be filled in with get-aheads.
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They will present this plan to the EVA team for comment. If there are issues with any of the proposed operations, they could
be worked out with tests in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL), which is a water tank in Houston with full-scale mock-ups of
portions of the ISS; crew members in modified space suits can practice “weightless” operations in the NBL.

Figure 1: Dynamic On-board Ubiquitous Graphics (DOUG)

As the plan is refined it is converted into a finished procedure. Many of the elements of the procedure, such as egress from
the station, traversal to a point, and ingress back into the station, are basically common elements that appear in every EVA
procedure; these will be copied into the new procedure and modified as necessary.

One concern of the team during the development of the plan is to ensure that equipment that the astronauts will be moving
near or on is powered off or locked down before they reach it, to ensure crew safety; these are referred to as constraints.
Because these elements are often critical elements—especially the power generation and transmission equipment—it is vital
to consider the effects of the shutdown on the rest of the ISS. This typically requires the plan to be approved by other flight
disciplines, such as the team responsible for ISS power.

The plan typically over-specifies these safety constraints, partially due to risk-aversion, but also due to the long lead time in
creating these procedures—the procedure authors do not know the exact configuration the station will be in at the time of the
space walk, and the exact position of various elements; there are also variances in the procedure that are allowed at the last
minute due to changing configurations. Thus, the tendency is to inhibit everything that might remotely be a hazard along to
the paths the astronauts will follow.

Automated  planning  support  

We have proposed and demonstrated a set of automated planning tools to support and simplify much of this operation. Our
goal with these tools was to provide assistance to the planners, and not to replace the human decision making. We see the
biggest value to the planning tools as eliminating some of the “ridiculous” or impossible plans early in the process, and
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basically to provide to the human planners a set of plans that meet the goals and constraints, and allow them to choose the
best and modify it as necessary.

We have applied our planning software in conjunction with the manual planning process discussed above, and our software
has developed plans that were somewhat more efficient than the plans arrived at by the manual process, allowing additional
get-ahead tasks to be performed. The picture below shows our planner graphical user interface (GUI).

The user drags and drops tasks to be planned from the available actions pane into the selected actions pane (the non-
highlighted actions). The user clicks on the planning icon and the planning engine produces a plan rendered in three ways: an
indented navigator view (top left), a hierarchical task network (top middle), and an activity timeline (bottom left). The
planner will also show additional tasks that it needed to add to make a valid plan (green tasks in the selected actions pane).
For each activity and for the plan as a whole the user can view the various properties such as the purpose of the activity and
start and end times. Plan statistics are also available showing slack time, tools and equipment used and metabolic data such
as the amount of oxygen consumed by each crewmember.

Figure 2: Automated Planning Interface

In the future, the execution of the plan will be tracked by the automated planner. In the event of an unexpected event or
unforeseen failure of one of the tasks, the remainder of the EVA can be automatically replanned in order to most efficiently
use the time that is still available. Automated tools could take into account task priority and time and materials that are
actually available at the point of the replan. As mentioned, manual planning is currently so time intensive that the flight
controllers typically do not even attempt to replan an EVA in the middle; instead they are more likely to abort the EVA in
order to replan at leisure.

Automated planning software can also be used to transition to more of a performance-based maintenance paradigm. With the
current paradigm equipment is replaced either on a time-based schedule or when its performance is observed to be degraded.
Planning software can be based on much more complex conditions, either based on actual usage of the equipment or, if the
information is available, based on telemetry data showing performance. Risk-based models can be used to distinguish
between equipment that must be repaired or replaced before failure, versus equipment that can be run until failure and then
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replaced to reduce cost without increasing risk.

Electronic  Procedures  doing  an  Extra-­‐ Vehicular  Activity  

The authors participated in a test of electronic procedures during a pair of EVAs in July of 2013. During these tests, the EVA
Flight Controller continued to use the standard mechanism of following the activities from a paper document, which he
manually annotated as the EVA proceeded. However, prior to the EVA we converted the procedure to an electronic format,
and another flight controller was tasked to sit in the back room and follow the EVA using the piece of software developed for
procedure tracking. The procedure tracking software was found to work very well for this purpose, and to provide a number
of capabilities that were unavailable with the standard mechanism; the flight controllers immediately saw the value of these
capabilities and are planning to continue to use electronic procedures in the future.

The first advantage of electronic procedures over the paper document relates to the physical layout of the procedure. Because
the EVA is a team effort involving three different astronauts, each with different but related activities, the procedure has been
designed and laid out in a three-column format, with each column showing the tasks of one astronaut. Nominally, all three
astronauts would be “on the same page” at the same time, but in actual practice one or another will be running ahead, and the
EVA Flight Controller has to flip backwards and forwards in the paper document to keep track of the different activities. The
electronic procedure viewer lays out the procedure in the same three columns, but simply allows the columns to scroll
independently and has a focus bar for each procedure. This drastically simplifies the task of keeping track of the activities.

The second, and probably the biggest, advantage of electronic procedures is that it allows other team members to log into a
web site and see the progress of the procedure. Anyone who has the proper credentials can log into the appropriate web site
and see the procedure; the procedure will be updated in real time as the tasks are updated. This proved to be very valuable for
a couple of reasons. First of all, the team members in the front and back rooms are traditionally tasked with keeping track of
the progress of the procedure for themselves; this is a fairly arduous process, based on listening in on the voice loop as the
astronauts report completed items. It is fairly easy to become distracted and lose track, or to have different team members
have a different impression of where the astronauts might be. Secondly, it turns out that a fairly large number of people in
and around the Johnson Space Center (JSC), such as the crew office, are interested in the progress of the EVA, but are
generally too busy to follow along for themselves; traditionally these people have only limited insight into the progress of the
EVA. By logging into the website, they can quickly see the progress of the EVA, issues that have arisen, and so on; they can
follow the EVA in the time available from other tasks that they need to complete.

Finally, the electronic procedure viewer allows users to enter comments on items in the procedure; these comments are
visible to everyone looking at the aforementioned website, and are also stored in a database and available for review after the
EVA is completed. This proved to be a heavily used feature; team members described it as almost having a “Wiki” for that
procedure. This proved to be a valuable way for the team members to communicate with each other, and to document issues
that needed to be addressed later.

Applications  of  this  Technology  for  Drilling  Operations  

We believe this technology developed for NASA manned spaceflight has potential to benefit well-site operations. Automated
planning technology can be used to ensure drilling plans comply with safety constraints specific to the drilling equipment and
location. This technology can build plans that determine what equipment and resources are needed based on the operating
procedures, ensuring that the right equipment and resources are available when needed. Routine maintenance tasks can be
added to the schedule on an as-needed and as-available basis, ensuring minimal disruption to operations while preventing
costly downtime due to equipment failure. Electronic procedure technology can improve situation awareness when
performing concurrent tasks, particularly when personnel are not all located in one place. This technology also logs the times
when tasks are complete and user comments about how tasks are performed. This is especially useful in situations where
something goes wrong and it is necessary to reconstruct what happened