A method of reducing downtime of production controls during upgrades

摘要

Updating a subsea electronics modules (SEM) software comprises transmitting packets to an underwater well via an umbilical data path, receiving and aggregating the packets on a modem card to form an update package, and using the package as a local master to update the software of further SEM. The packets may be transmitted using time or frequency division multiplexing, utilising spare bandwidth of the transmission line. Multiple SEM may be connected via a local network (e.g. Ethernet (RTM)), and the use of the software package as a local master may be triggered by a surface-sent trigger signal. The invention is designed to overcome problems of updates requiring production to halt whilst the update data is transmitted by utilising capacity of the transmission line not used during normal operation.