# Orchestrating OSDU/Energistics Geomodelling Activity services and user's interactive decisions within a Geoscientific Workflow platform,

Jean Francois Rainaud, Valentin Gauthier, Christelle Loiselet, Nicolas

Clausolles, Yann Dantal, Michel Perrin

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## ► To cite this version:

Jean Francois Rainaud, Valentin Gauthier, Christelle Loiselet, Nicolas Clausolles, Yann Dantal, et al.. Orchestrating OSDU/Energistics Geomodelling Activity services and user's interactive decisions within a Geoscientific Workflow platform,. 86th EAGE Annual Conference & Exhibition, European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE), Jun 2025, Toulouse, France. hal-05124395

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Submitted on 21 Jun 2025

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# Title: Orchestrating OSDU/Energistics Geomodelling Activity services and user's interactive decisions within a Geoscientific Workflow platform.

## Introduction:

Managing geoscientific workflows interacting with end users over a network by using strictly approved standard data models and APIs is the grail for many operators, SME's and research institutes. A first attempt towards this approach called EpiSEM & EpiSEM ACTION was initiated in the late 90s by the multi-company consortium POSC [Rainaud, 2005]. Several other projects have followed during the last twenty years but none of them achieved this goal. Most developers assumed that using more or less stable standards would require more effort and time than developing their own data models and APIs. Consequently, the solutions that emerged, remained in most cases proprietary. At present, there only exist few examples of geoscientific workflows involving multiple partners.

Energistics (www.energistics.org) and OSDU (www.osduforum.org) now intend to provide stable data models and APIs for Earth Modeling & Reservoir simulation in the Geoscience domain. Working on the new releases and taking experience and benefit of previous Proofs Of Concepts [Untereiner, 2022], (Rainaud, 2024), we now propose a solution for allowing **automatically managed user's interaction during workflow processes**. We use a standard Activity Template Model for defining the geomodelling service tasks and we integrate them in a BPMN designed workflow using a Business Process Model and a Notation platform (BPMN: standard ISO/CEI 19510). We orchestrate and operate this workflow of microservices in a Cloud environment and we deliver reporting and lineage information inside Activity Model instances "logs".

Our solution strictly follows the new releases of the Energistics and OSDU standards (EnergyML including RESQML V2.2 and ETP 1.2, Mercury_M24). Our platform is deployed on a public Cloud but can also target private, hybrid Clouds and on premises implementation. We demonstrate here with the French Geological Survey (BRGM: www.brgm.fr/en) how to add and operate more and more geoscientist's activities and user's interactive business decisions in a deployment strategy.

## Present-day situation:

In business environments (E&P companies, Geological Surveys), there exist different layers of standards for cloud-native approaches. Each of them has its vendor lock-in issues.

The overall objective of OSDU is to provide a metadata definition model on which the underlying Data Models and APIs are free and open to be used by any operator or SME on any cloud software. Access to the numerical data themselves is operated through DDMS's (Domain Data Management Systems) or Content data Storage. In complement, the Energistics Data Model is designed for interoperable data exchange between geomodelling applications by means of an ETP (Energistics Transfer Protocol) API or a set of EPC (Energistics Package Container) +HDF5 files.

The RESQML v2.2 data model and the OSDU reservoir Domain Definition are now interoperable at the metadata level. Since 2022, the Energistics community has made further effort for ingesting the RESQML v2.2 information into the OSDU platform and for providing an ETP V1.2 server to be used as a Reservoir Data Domain Management System inside OSDU.

In this environment, we use the Energistics and OSDU business Activity models designed in accordance with the Epicentre Activity model created by POSC in the early 2000's and adopted by SLB and Aspen Tech. This constitutes a sound basis for developing a workflow management system and for organizing business activities as tasks according to a BPMN workflow standard.

Furthermore, the concept of Activity Template from Energistics and OSDU, allows us to define atomic services (micro services with their inputs and outputs).

## Our approach: Workflow Orchestration including user's interactive business decisions.

From previous concepts initiated in [Untereiner 2022] and implemented in [Rainaud 2024], our architecture has evolved in order to take more and more benefit of the BPMN standard. Previously we defined Activity Instance inputs (specification of the input, output and parameters to be considered
for each service) at the beginning of the execution of an overall automatic workflow. We now allow end users to interrupt, relaunch and drive the workflow from time to time.

We have evaluated how end users can operate this new solution in the E&P and other domains: Geotechnics, Geothermal energy, Geological risk evaluation. The Proof of Concept that we now present, allows the users to interactively define activity instance inputs at any time before and/or during the execution of a workflow totally designed by a BPMN "no code" tool. In this case, the workflow specification can be independently defined in view of the end user needs. Interactive and computation tasks both defined by Activity Templates, can be proposed accordingly.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: Updated event-driven Architecture</figcaption></figure>

The bottom layer consists in a data service API: an EnergyML Domain Data Management System provides access on the network to metadata and numerical data through a web-socket API (the ETP API: Energistics Transfer Protocol) and/or the linkage to an OSDU Platform through a REST API.

Consequently, all interactive and computation tasks can dialog with an Earth Modeling and Reservoir Management System, which is able to provide, manage and receive EnergyML entities managed in dataspaces. The data storage on this Earth modeling & Reservoir DDMS can be operated on the cloud or on premises (using Kubernetes Clusters).

**Improvements presented in figure 1 :**

*Facilitating experts' collaboration to define workflows with Open-Source interactive "no-code" UI.*

This was a strong demand from the French Geological Survey (BRGM), which has already set up a project for defining/organizing all their processes with a BPMN "no code" **Workflow Modeler**. To fulfill this need, our Proof of Concept takes as input a BPMN entity for all workflow declarations. These are now proposed to end users through a Web workflow triggered from the **3D Web UI**.

*Using the OSDU / EnergyML Activity Template to define tasks and Activity Model Instance to report.*

In the early version (Untereiner 2022), the Activity Templates described both workflows and service input & output specifications: name, descriptive keywords, input/output, parameters. Today the Activity templates are still defined by the **EnergyML Webstudio** for characterizing the **interactive tasks** (compose Activity instance input and take decisions) and the **computing services** (operate and create Activity Instance output "logs").

*Automatizing the interactive 3D Web UI development by using OSDU/Energistics Activity Template.*

For consequence, a list of BPMN workflows accessible on a https end point, will be proposed to the user on the **3D WEB UI** (figure 2).
As soon as the workflow is selected, this **3D WEB UI**, is able to interact with the Earth Model & Reservoir DDMS to access the EnergyML entities. For each task, a dedicated End User UI will fill up some **BPMN forms** to communicate with the **BPMN Workflow Orchestrator**. This UI is composed automatically from Energistics entities and parameters defined into the Activity Templates.

This ensures that **end user's decisions** are fully taken into account and that the **monitoring of the workflow** is ensured. Both can be followed up on specific https: end points in order to offer to the user a complete knowledge on what could happen during the completion of the operations.

## Operating the services into a Kubernetes Cluster

All the operations are based on the exchanges of secured messages (by **Keycloack**) on a **Cloud-events router**. The messages are monitored by the **Process automation Engine** inside a Kubernetes cluster. This commands a **broker** of services. Each service performs an Activity defined by its Activity Template / Activity input. It produces EnergyML entities (mainly Geomodelling structures of Interpretations, Representations and Properties) and an Activity "log".

## Proof of concept : Interactive Faulted surface Modeling

For operating this Proof of Concept, we added a few algorithms to those previously implemented. We paid a special attention to the development and experimentation of services using Docker Containers built by **BRGM** into the open source library **gstlearn** (new cross-platform Geostatistics C++ library proposed by MINES PARIS - PSL University). We encapsulated this code in order to dialog with OSDU / EnergyML Reservoir DDMS Workspaces/ Dataspaces. The "no code" BPMN Tool introduced two main categories of tasks:

* **Human Tasks** (HUMAN TASK) are proposed to the users in order to **manage the workflows**.

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

* **Service Tasks** (SERVICE TASK) are defined by Activity Templates and **launched** and controlled automatically **by a workflow engine**.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

* Both can exchange with an **Earth Model Dataspace** (an OSDU R DDMS structure).

* At the end of a process **Activity Model << logs >>** are generated (parts of the RESMQL model)

In our example we introduced an **exclusive gateway**. However, plenty of other scenarios can be modeled and orchestrated since the workflow engine can cover, manage, control and replay all the capabilities of the BPMN standard.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Fig 2: BPMN standard workflow implemented for the Proof of concept.</figcaption></figure>

Once he/she has chosen the workflow represented on figure 2 among many others, the user should select a **dataspace**, a specific Horizon Interpretation together with a well marker set plus a fault InterpretationSet (represented by polylines). He/she operates a first computation with the krigging service by gathering entities from a permanent dataspace and using some parameters defined in the first human task : "Faulted Geol unit surface Modeling Launching".

The service tasks that come next, operate and generate a result in a working dataspace and an activity "log". This activity "log" is first used to propose an evaluation of the quality of the result.
If the quality is poor at the end of the first run, the workflow engine goes back to the first Human Task in order to update the parameters and he/she relaunches the task sequence. If the quality looks fine at the end of the second run, the result is stored into the permanent dataspace and the activity "log" and related relationships are added to the generated entities.

**Conclusion:**

The management of geomodelling workflows is still challenging but our solution based on professional standards and IT standards successfully tackles with several key issues:

* Data sharing using RESQML/OSDU Data Model for storing and exchanging by means of an ETP protocol (using both Http/Rest and Web sockets),

* Flexibility by taking advantage of the cloud computing model to automate process orchestration based on the RESQML/OSDU Activity model,

* Full management of human interaction,

* Q/C evaluation operated by ensuring activity traceability, taking into the process history and by following up the becoming of the managed entities along the different steps of the workflow,

* Re-runing of previous processes with updated parameters giving the way to digital twins.

Our work will allow a progressive replacement of monolithic applications of proprietary workflows by combination of micro services (docker encapsulation of existing functions and algorithms).

Future work will consist in:

* Propose/exploit ontology to express the business operations realized by the Activity Templates.

* Explore more use cases for Structural Earth and Reservoir Grid modelling and Geotechnics

* Converge towards a standardized open geoscientific workflow automation platform for more and more applications in the fields of Oil & Gas, CO₂ Capture and Storage, Geotechnics, Geothermal energy, Captured underground hydrogen and possibly in some others.

* Integrate as Activity Template and service tasks Open Source codes provided by consortia on which BRGM participates: Loop (www.loop3D.org) and Ring team (www.ring-team.org)

* Propose collaboration with other Independent Software partners

**References:**

Rainaud, J.F. (2005). A Short History of the Last 15 Year's Quest for It Interoperability in the Petroleum E&P Industry. Oil & Gas Science and Technology - Rev. IFP, 60(4), 597-605.

Pennequin D. (2017), David PY., Servière M., Amraoui N., Loiselet C. Hydro-System Flow Modelling for Water Resources Management in the Fractured and Karstified Chalk Aquifer Environment of Eastern Normandy. In: Renard P., Bertrand C. (eds) EuroKarst 2016, Neuchâtel. Advances in Karst Science. Springer, Cham,

Nunes P.V., Furuholt V., Burns N., Aursand P. (2020) Vendor-Independent Workflow Architecture to Integrate Domain Applications and Accelerate R&D to Production. First EAGE Digitalization Conference and Exhibition 30 November - 3 December 2020, Vienna, Austria

Piantanida M., Dalla Rosa M., Volpi B., (2020) Geoscience Workflow Tracking by Means of RESQML Standard Format, First EAGE Digitalization Conference and Exhibition, Ext. Abstracts

Untereiner L., Rainaud J.F., Perrin M., Gauthier V. (2022) A Cloud-Native Standard-based Geoscientific Workflow Architecture for improving geomodelers’ collaboration; 83rd EAGE annual conference and exhibition, Extended Abstracts.

Rainaud J.F, Gauthier V, Untereiner L., Perrin M, Arnould A., Belhaouari H., Lepaire C.(2024); Driving collaboration between OSDU/Energistics Business Activity services by a cloud-native Geoscientific Workflow platform; 85th EAGE annual conference and exhibition, Extended Abstract.

Laure Pizzella, Nicolas Clausolles, Christian Brogaard Pedersen, Philippe Calcagno, Montse Colomer, et al.. Geomodelling in Europe: Sharing practices and open-sourcing tools among Geological Surveys. 37th International Geological Congress, Aug 2024, Busan (Corée), South Korea.