Graph Tracing - Oil and Gas

Data is essential to the Oil & Gas drilling industry. Depth, geologic layers, hardness, heat, etc. all provide clues for guiding drills toward successful finds. A major industry technology provider approached Iterate with a unique problem: the oil drilling machines in the field produce an ongoing record of the telemetry coming from the drill head, but that data is produced as an analog printout (looking similar to an EKG):

To make this data work at scale and to form a complete 3D model of the geologic layers in the area, our partner needed to digitize all of these printouts back into some digital form-- not just scans of the documents but getting all the data as numeric data from the graphs.

Our data engineers trained several different machine learning (ML) models to do the following:

• Automatically learn to read the scale of each graph (e.g., what the x and y coordinates mean)
• Learn to find the undulating line of data within each graph (while simultaneously learning to ignore any printing chaff)
• Mathematically calculate and record each linear graph into a series of numerical data points (i.e., something like a Fourier Transform on a massive scale)
• Pass these massive data tables to a standard cloud storage
• Deploy Interplay® to take those newly created data stores and produce data visualizations and reporting as requested

We tackled this problem with zest and were able to produce a working app in a matter of a few weeks. Above is the Flow of how we put this app together.

This project empowered our partner not only to digitize an ongoing operational need but also to provide an excellent historical record that can further allow the end clients to synthesize more extensive trend data.

If you have a similar data problem, please let us know by contacting us below.