INDUSTRY REPORTS
Digital twin collaboration
Sharada Prahladrao, PR manager at ARC India, reports from the ARC India Forum.
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t the ARC India Forum in July, Bentley Systems focused on digital twins, and its collaborative efforts. Tracing the digital journey, speakers from Bentley explained how industry moved from drawing boards to the computer 20 years ago; and then on to servers and now to the Cloud with unlimited computing power. Presentations by Anne-Marie Walters, industry marketing director, Oil and Gas and Manufacturing at Bentley Systems; and Amit Shrivastava, regional sales engagement manager at Bentley Systems, highlighted several areas: • Digital twins have emerged as a key focus area for infrastructure projects and assets. • Integration between information technology (IT), operational technology (OT), and engineering technology (ET) is vital to streamline business processes. • Bentley has developed technology partnerships with companies such as Siemens to help speed industrial growth. In previous years Bentley has focused on its going digital strategy and the connected data environment (CDE) at the forum. This year, it was all about digital twins. Walters began her presentation by explaining what a digital twin is and why it is now the company’s focus area. In simple terms, it is the digital representation of a physical asset, process, or system; which is continuously surveyed or synchronised from multiple sources to generate insights for predictability and performance optimisation.
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Walters also spoke about digital workflows and the huge benefits realised in terms of health and safety, operator training, planned shut-downs and maintenance after information verification. “Sharing information in a digital, 3D world enables greater collaboration and stakeholder engagement,” explained Walters. “Digital twins help simulate the work environment and perform status checks, predict possibility of failure, plan logistics, check progress and so on.” Shrivastava went on to talk about solutions to combat today’s challenges – the main one being data aggregation. Digital twins require data from information and operational technologies to understand the current state of the project or asset. Combining data from engineering technologies into a digital twin enables simulations so users can try out different scenarios or predict the performance of an asset, he explained. In this context he spoke about Siemens and Bentley Systems’ jointly
developed PlantSight. The two companies created the PlantSight digital twin solution to help customers improve the efficiency of their plant operations, with process plant operations being documented in data. Typically, this information is stored in multiple silos of information in various formats, making it difficult to access and verify. PlantSight brings all this data and information together, then contextualises, validates, and visualises it. It transforms data into one complete digital twin – an ‘evergreen’ digital twin that is continuously updated. It is hoped that PlantSight will help process plant owner-operators realise the benefits of digital twins, up-dated in real time for operations, without disrupting their existing physical or virtual environment. Shrivastava explained the company’s step-wise approach: • Create a 3D reality mesh from 2D photographs or scans. • Train the software to automatically recognise and classify components. • Visualise classified components. • Aggregate with other information into digital twins. Reality modelling is already being used to transform photographs into accurate 3D models to zoom in on the trouble spots (such as rusted parts) and fix them. Adding the element of time with continuous surveying,
PlantSight is a digital twin solution for process industries.
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