To date, solutions for drilling automation have focused on assisting functionalities to the drilling processby the mean of fault detection, isolation and recovery (FDIR) functions, safe operating envelopes (SOE),control methods applied to a few parameters, and automated standard procedures. Yet, the decision toexecute different functions has been left to a human operator. In this paper, we address the next level indrilling automation: a method to achieve autonomous drilling. Autonomous drilling requires that the software solution is capable to adapt itself to unexpected situations,to learn both online and from experience, all this in a timely fashion and with incomplete information.Our approach to autonomous drilling is based on the minimization of a "cost" function that incorporatesboth performance evaluations and risk assessments, in order to reach a certain goal. Here, our objective isto minimize the drilling time to arrive at the section total depth (TD). This time evaluation also includespossible delays that could be incurred in case of drilling incidents.
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