Are wires arranged logically so that troubleshooting is easier? How have you isolated electrical signals to avoid noise? How stable is the rig? Is it easily moved from location to location, or is your design too costly to ship it overseas? Maybe your winning design will be set up at the next SPE/IADC Drilling Conference.
For those with a virtual rig, do you provide a block diagram of the closed loop system, with well-defined inputs and outputs to the blocks such as controller, plant (or model), and sensor (or sensor dynamics), and other blocks as necessary. Have you thought about the uncertainties in the models and how those can be taken into account in the control design? Do you provide solid explanations behind your design decisions? What about disturbances and noise affecting the closed loop system? Do you display it on the block diagram? How modular is your code? How hard will it be to tackle new challenges in future competitions? These are just a few of the many items that interest our judges.
