Aker Solutions Control Systems

What Aker Solutions Control Systems Actually Does

Aker Solutions Control Systems is the industrial automation and control division that grew out of Kvaerner's engineering heritage. They build distributed control systems, SCADA platforms, and specialized software for oil and gas production facilities, subsea operations, and process plants. The systems handle everything from basic temperature and pressure regulation to complex well-manifold optimization and emergency shutdown sequences. Their main product line includes the AKASuite platform, which integrates control, monitoring, and data analytics into a single environment. It runs on standard Windows-based servers with redundancy built in, and it communicates with field devices through protocols like HART, Foundation Fieldbus, and Modbus. Most subsea tie-backs in the North Sea run on some variant of their architecture. What makes their setup different from a typical DCS vendor is the depth of oilfield-specific logic baked into the software. Standard process controls are there, but so are wellhead controllers, choke manifold management, artificial lift integration, and facility-wide production optimization routines that you'd otherwise have to engineer from scratch.

Getting Aker Solutions Control Systems Up and Running

Here is the practical sequence. First, you need a valid license file from Aker Solutions. They do not sell this off-the-shelf. You go through their sales engineering team, specify your facility's I/O count, the number of control loops, and whether you need subsea capability. Expect a lead time of 4 to 8 weeks for the initial quote and license provisioning. Once you have the license, install the AKASuite software on a dedicated server. Minimum specs are 32 GB RAM, dual Xeon or equivalent, and a redundant power supply. They will send you an installation guide, but the critical step most people mess up is the network configuration. You need to isolate the control network from the plant IT network at the switch level, not just rely on a firewall rule. I have seen two facilities where a misconfigured VLAN bridge let a phishing email on the corporate network cascade into the control system bus. That is not a hypothetical risk with these installations. After the network is clean, run the hardware discovery utility. It scans for all connected I/O cards, communication modules, and field device gateways. Map each physical input to a tag in the database. Aker's tagging convention is strict, and if you do not follow their naming hierarchy, downstream reporting modules will break. The naming structure looks like this: Area-Unit-Service-Tag-Type. Example: NOR-01-WHP-PT-101 for a pressure transmitter on the Norne platform, unit 01.

Then configure your control loops. Start with the simple ones. PID loops for temperature and pressure should stabilize within minutes. Move to sequence logic next. Emergency shutdown trains need separate validation because a mistake here can trigger a false trip or, worse, fail to trip when needed.

What Nobody Tells You About Implementation

The biggest issue I ran into on my first full AKASuite deployment was the real-time database sync between the control server and the historian. Aker's default polling interval is 500 milliseconds for process variables and 2 seconds for status tags. On a small installation this works fine. On a platform with over 40,000 tags, the historian start-up sequence took 47 minutes on cold boot instead of the quoted 12. The workaround was splitting the tag database into three separate historian clients running on different servers and load-balancing the polling. That cut startup to about 8 minutes and reduced CPU load on the primary server from 78 percent to 34 percent. Another thing that catches people off guard: the alarm suppression feature. Aker's system allows dynamic alarm suppression based on operating state, which is useful during startup and shutdown transients. But the suppression rules are stored in a separate database from the control logic. When I was commissioning a gas lift facility, the suppression rules from the previous well test had not been cleared. The system silently suppressed high-pressure alarms for 6 hours because the control logic still thought we were in a controlled shutdown state. We caught it because the shift supervisor was manually checking pressure gauges instead of relying solely on the HMI. That is a hard lesson. Always verify alarm silencing status during handover, and audit suppression logs weekly. The software also has a quirk with redundant server failover. The heartbeat detection between primary and secondary control servers uses a proprietary protocol on a dedicated Ethernet link. If that link shares a switch with any other traffic, even briefly, the failover timer can trigger a spurious switchover. I solved this by putting the heartbeat link on its own managed switch with port isolation, completely separate from the rest of the control network.

Common Pitfalls with Aker Solutions Control Systems

Tag renaming after initial commissioning is another one. The system allows it, but any historical trend data linked to the old tag name becomes orphaned. The database does not automatically re-link trends. You have to manually migrate the history through a SQL query against the historian backend, and even then, data granularity changes at the rename point because the new tag gets a fresh polling interval assignment. Subsea controller integration is where the system gets expensive fast. Each subsea wellhead controller requires a dedicated seabed junction box, a fiber-optic umbilical link back to the platform, and a licensed communication module in the control rack. A single-well tie-back can cost upwards of 2.5 million dollars in control hardware alone. For marginal fields, this pricing model makes brownfield debottlenecking more economical than greenfield development. There is also a licensing tier you need to be aware of. Aker locks certain advanced functionality behind premium licenses. Production optimization algorithms, ML-based predictive maintenance modules, and subsea closed-loop control are all optional add-ons. The base system does not include them. If you buy the base license expecting those features, you will hit a wall during commissioning. Check the license matrix before you sign anything.

The reporting module is another area where the system shows its age. The built-in daily production report generator is functional but requires manual entry of certain parameters like choke settings and fluid properties. There is no automated pull from field instruments for those values. I wrote a Python script that queries the historian API and populates the missing fields before the report runs. It took me about three days to build and now saves the operations team roughly 40 minutes per shift. The script is not pretty but it works reliably.

When This System Is the Wrong Choice

Aker Solutions Control Systems is overkill for small remote sites with fewer than 500 I/O points. The licensing cost and server infrastructure requirements make the total cost of ownership significantly higher than lighter-weight PLC-based solutions from Rockwell or Schneider. For a simple water injection pump skid, a CompactLogix setup will do the job at a fraction of the price and with easier local troubleshooting. The support model is another consideration. Aker's service response times are decent for major installations with service-level agreements, but small operators without an SLA often wait 24 to 48 hours for a remote support session. During a compressor trip event on a platform I consulted for, we were without vendor support for nearly 30 hours before someone logged in. The site engineer had to reverse-engineer the fault code from the error log using the troubleshooting manual. It worked, but it was not ideal. Training is another gap. There is no self-service training portal like Emerson or Honeywell offers. You have to send your engineers to their facility for classroom training, which runs about 5 days per person and costs around 4,000 euros including travel. For a team of four, that is a week of lost productivity plus significant expense. Some operators have started recording their own internal training videos, which helps but does not replace the formal certification that Aker requires for independent system modifications.