Speaking at the 2022 ARC Industry Forum Peter Reynolds (ARC) introduced a session devoted to the notion of a ‘sustainable and open’ asset digital twin to support the plant lifecycle. ARC is hosting a Sustainable Asset DT Working Group, along the lines of Exxon’s work on open automation (which led to the ongoing OPA Forum). The focus of the WG is openness in the context of plant operations and maintenance. Today’s solutions depend on siloed data created in point solutions with different tools. This leads to successive lost revenue opportunities as data is exchanged between stakeholders who leverage yet more tools! By eliminating the information handover dips, ‘profitability would be off the chart’. Fields of application include brown fields, green fields, new reactors, furnaces, piping and upstream hardware. ‘This is just never ending’. The WG includes Chevron, Dow, Exxon and Shell, and is further presented in an ARC white paper, Moving Toward Sustainable Asset Digital Twins. ARC defines the DT thus, ‘A digital twin is a digital replica of a physical asset using a 3D model and/or math algorithms’. Current plant digital twins enable collaboration among those using engineering data and documents during design, build and commissioning. The DT then becomes a vehicle for continuous handover of engineering data and documentation to operations. The DT is said to address sustainability in the ‘currently underserved’ asset management business where ‘nearly all digital twins created during design and build decay and die after handover’.
ExxonMobil’s Michael Hotaling bemoaned the way that many IT/engineering approaches are ‘solutions looking for a problem’. These are ‘sexy shiny keys’ that the vendors hand over, and, a couple of years down the road, ‘our technical debt has been lost’. Hotaling sees the DT as essentially a 3D model. ExxonMobil already has some 80-90 use cases for the DT. But these focus on benefits, less on costs and sustainability. Which is where we are today. He suggested being humble, ‘oil and gas is not a leader in the DT space, the automotive, airline markets are much further along’. This is an industry-wide opportunity to transform how we operate. Why are we stuck with 2D drawings? One reason is regulatory reporting. Industry needs to talk with a single voice to the regulator and persuade them of the merits of a 3D approach. Hotaling warned that the DT term can be misleading. DTs may cover physics, engineering and thermodynamics which are out of scope for the current work group. While a 3D model is just a dumb picture until you interlace it with data, data cleansing and management are likewise out of scope. Hotaling’s focus is 3D visualization of the asset. This is where an open architecture is required. And (as for OPA) with a separation of software from data. To support everyone’s needs it needs to be an open architecture. Otherwise ‘it will die a slow death’. 3D model maturity is defined by complexity, level of integration (how many datasets) and number of sustainable business use cases (Hotaling admitted that to date, Exxon has only one!) Things will get interesting when you can add time data. Currently it is hard to reconcile documents covering engineering design, as built, approved and change-managed. Model fidelity and frequency is a constant battle. The current state of 3D and data is ‘all over the map’. But we now know what not to do. The future DT will be agnostic in terms of imagery. There is huge potential to capture 3D data from Lidar or 3D images on your phones. Scanning data into an open architecture will automate model update, moving from today’s custom built, costly models. So is this down to a lack of standards or too many? No current reality capture to 3D is standards-based. This is where we are trying to work. It will take the industry to get there, both operators and suppliers.
Watch Hotaling’s Journey to a Sustainable Digital Twin on YouTube and the ensuing ARC Panel Discussion.
Fore more on the SADT watch the video here and download the ARC white paper.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.