Patent decision

BL number
O/172/12
Concerning rights in
GB0822475.0
Hearing Officer
Mr P Slater
Decision date
24 April 2012
Person(s) or Company(s) involved
Logined B.V.
Provisions discussed
PA 1977 Section 1(2)
Keywords
Excluded fields (refused)
Related Decisions
None

Summary

The invention relates to the management of oil production in an oil-field, and in particular to a so-called “Field Management (FM) systems” which can be used to simulate various aspects of the oil field from surface facilities to subsurface structures. This involves the use of various simulators and economic software packages to assist in production of field development, surface facility design, and revenue optimisation amongst other things. Traditionally, the Field Management (FM) functionality has been distributed amongst the various subsurface reservoir simulators, surface facility network simulators, and associated controllers which make up the field management system. However, because each separate simulator had its own management functions associated with its proprietary brand, it was often necessary to run separate field management strategies for every individual subsurface and surface simulator. It was therefore extremely difficult to consolidate the field management strategies from different simulators into a single strategy that could be used to direct drilling activities that optimized the contribution of the drilling activity to all aspects of the reservoir field. It would therefore be desirable to create a field management system to which various proprietary simulators can be coupled and decoupled as and when required so that different field management strategies can be assessed easily without modification of the underlying software. The invention seeks to overcome this problem by making the field management system more modular and flexible. This is said to be achieved by defining a field management “framework” consisting of a series of adaptors and open interfaces which are used to connect various simulators to the field management system in a manner which is independent of their origin, structure or functionality.

The Hearing Officer considered the four-step test in Aerotel/Macrossan in the light of the Symbian judgment, and found the contribution to relate to a computer program as such, and having found no technical contribution refused the application under Section 18(3).

Full decision O/172/12 PDF document69Kb