Page 46: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (Jul/Aug 2019)

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AUTOMATION Digital Twin

DIGITAL

TWIN:

Taking Shape of the

Offshore Ecosystem

Source: ABS he offshore industry is going through an unprecedented be because the elements that make up a digital twin are be- digital disruption that transcends asset classes and is creat- spoke to why it is being built – i.e., the purpose for which the

Ting a roadmap to safer and more cost-effective operations. asset owner is building it.

The current face of that transition is the ‘digital twin’, a At its heart, a digital twin is a virtual condition model of an virtual replica of physical assets, processes and systems that asset on which simulations can be run to improve/predict opera- ultimately will be used by owners to predict failures before tional characteristics without having to physically affect the asset.

they happen and make production more reliable. The virtual asset’s scale – whether it represents a simple compo-

The technologies that enable advanced data analytics – such nent or complex marine ecosystem – detail (will every bracket on as arti? cial intelligence, machine learning, streaming analyt- the rig be modeled and its condition tracked?) and the frequency at ics and parallel processing power – have matured to the point which it is to be updated determines the complexity of the model. that huge volumes of data now can be cleaned and analyzed Once the scale is decided, the owner then de? nes the analyti- in near real-time, rather than days. The offshore industry has cal capabilities of the condition model; will operational decision- always produced a lot of data; simply put, processing it has making be improved by real-time data-based analytics, predictive become a far more time- and cost-effective process. analytics, physics-based analytics, ? nite element analysis, etc.

Ongoing pilot projects – with rig and platform builders and op- To some degree, classi? cation societies have been working erators, offshore supply companies and the ? oating production, with their clients on basic digital twins for some time. But storage and of? oading unit (FPSO) community – are currently rapid recent advances in computational power have allowed performing the type of real-time data analyses that improve as- the scope of those models to be aggressively expanded.

set reliability, safety, drilling ef? ciency and well production. Progressive owners now have the power to expand the scope

They are proving that asset downtime can be reliably reduced. of the assets they choose to model from equipment and sub-

It’s a common joke among data specialists working in the systems to an entire rig, platform or ? oating production sys- offshore sector that you can ask 10 people in a room to de- tem and their wider ecosystems. scribe a digital twin and you will get 20 de? nitions. That may This is a signi? cant step forward. Why? Because an asset’s 46 OFFSHORE ENGINEER OEDIGITAL.COM