Case Study: Baker Hughes improves drilling precision and halves development effort with MathWorks' Model-Based Design (MATLAB & Simulink)

Baker Hughes Improves Precision of Oil and Gas Drilling Equipment

Baker Hughes, facing distorted magnetometer and accelerometer signals from downhole vibrations that made precise wellbore positioning and field testing difficult and costly, sought to improve its directional measurement algorithms. Working with MathWorks, the team adopted Model-Based Design using MATLAB and Simulink (with Embedded Coder, Simulink Check, and Simulink Coverage) to move away from error-prone hand-coded C and to build a repeatable way to simulate and validate complex drilling scenarios.

MathWorks’ tools enabled Baker Hughes to create detailed environment and sensor models, run desktop simulations and hardware-in-the-loop tests, generate production code, and implement continuous unit testing and model checks. The result: far fewer expensive field tests (each >$100,000), roughly a 50% reduction in future development effort through model reuse, improved firmware quality and reliability, and generation of about half the system code from the Simulink models.

Baker Hughes

Ingolf Wassermann

System Architect