Speaking at the 2023 AMG World Oil & Gas Automation and Technology Week in Houston, Graham Provost presented Corys’ dynamic digital twins. These cross-industry (transport, nuclear, hydrocarbons) simulators leverage Corys’ IndissPlus dynamic simulation platform. IndissPlus’ chemical engineering first principles-based models match process behavior at normal operations or during transient periods and are used in both dynamic studies of plant behavior or incorporated into an operator training simulator. The digital twin is said to improve operations by removing bias and by ‘challenging existing beliefs in best practices’.
Veerum CEO David Lod presented on the impact of unified visual data in operations and maintenance, HSE and productivity. Visuals get a message into the brain ‘60,000 times faster and with a 400% improvement in information retention’. Veerum’s Vision for 3D models technology blends lidar, photo, P&ID information with equipment tag data and geolocation into an ‘intelligent reality model’ – a.k..a an integrated digital twin. Lod observed that data capture technology is getting cheaper and more powerful and the cloud is making storage scalable and accessible. ‘AI/ML no longer requires years of effort to implement’. Visual machine learning is now available ‘out of the box’. Models can be trained to detect clashes and safety issues across a plant. More from Veerum.
Peter Boyle and Jeremiah Hannley (Streamline Control) gave a short history of the evolution of Scada systems to highlight the challenges of legacy Scada architectures. Traditional Scada systems are ‘brittle’ and require multiple applications running to support non-Scada functions. Serial protocols, data latency and volumes are also problematic and cybersecurity is often implemented as ‘security through obscurity’. The advent of middleware (MQTT and Sparkplug-B) is changing the situation with a publish/subscribe mechanism that allows data context to be efficiently captured from edge devices in a secure, encrypted environment with all components password protected. Case histories were presented of implementations of the middleware approach leveraging MQTT platforms from OASys and Ignition.
Daniel Alcantara presented MagellanX’s IIoT wearables for worker health and safety. Alcantra observed that while safety has improved since the noughties, it has plateaued recently. Wearables such as MagellanX’s SOL-X SmartWatch help assure worker wellbeing by tracking wellness, controlling work and assuring regulatory compliance. Accompanying software can be adapted to workflows, checklists and permits. Data from wearables is consolidated in the control room, providing situational awareness and ensuring that safety barrier management is observed. A graphical interface displays worker wellbeing and allows drill down into issues such as engine room heat exposure or enclosed space entry and condition monitoring.
Jon Fredrickson presented Wazoku’s (formerly Innocentive, an Eli Lilly
online network) ‘innovation challenges’, outsourced solution finding
for problem solving. The idea is that ‘there is always somewhere
someone smarter outside of your organization’, and that ‘getting a
diverse range of fresh perspectives is key to effective problem
solving’. Fredrickson presented two oil and gas related challenges that
were solved by Innocentive. The Oil Spill Recovery Institute (OSRI)
leveraged open innovation to solve residual pollution from the Exxon
Valdez. In 2008 Paradigm Geophysical leveraged a radiologists’
expertise to ‘prevent dry-holes’ in the Gulf of Mexico (see Oil IT
Journal). To date Wazuko/Innocentive
has funded some 2,500 innovation challenges with over $60 million
awarded. More from Wazoku.
Mark Hammer (Yokogawa) provided an update on OPAS, the ExxonMobil-backed Open Process Automation Standard from The Open Group. OPAS is said to be a ‘standard of standards’, notably those from OPC Foundation, ISA, ANSI, DMTF Redfish and ISO. Field devices connect through the OPAS Connectivity Framework and on to various consumers – notably an ‘advanced computing platform’ (ACP), an on-premise OT data center providing virtual DCN and IEC 62264 Level 2 & 3 functionality. An enterprise business platform executes IEC level 4 functions. Yokogawa’s ACP provides process control system-related workloads, control engineering functions and more. ExxonMobil’s OPAS testbed is now in its third year of operations. Other trials are underway including Petronas’ INSTEP field trial and testbed deployments by Reliance, Shell and Aramco. Hammer observed that ‘multiple industry efforts are driving out niche standards’ and that OPAS is ‘inevitable’.
Next year’s AMG World Oil & Gas Automation and Technology Week will again be held in Houston on the 13-14 February 2024.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.