What are the benefits of the operational digital twin?
What is an operational digital twin?
An operational digital twin is a digital replica of an operational process. It uses data from sensors, machines, control systems, and maintenance systems to build one or multiple models of an operational process. This model is built with real-time data and the model contains the entire history of the operational process. This enables the owner of the operational process to truly understand and optimize the process to improve performance and reduce cost.
An example operational digital twin model screenshot is shown in Figure 1.
This is an operational digital twin solution for drilling operations and it primarily focuses on the asset health of drilling equipment such as top drives, mud pumps, and generators. The digital twin model predicts potential failures in the equipment, guides the field with maintenance activities, and enables the drilling company to understand and optimize equipment performance.
What are the benefits of operational digital twins?
So what are the benefits of an operational digital twin solution? There are three key benefits:
1. Improved equipment health
2. Retain domain expertise
3. Optimized supply chain
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1. Improved equipment health
Today, customers are pushing equipment harder than ever before. With rising costs equipment is becoming more expensive and a bigger part of the operational cost. In addition, unplanned equipment downtime not only means increased maintenance cost but often more importantly, reduced revenue and competitiveness.
Because of the above reasons, improving equipment health has become an imperative in asset-intensive industries. Methods for improving equipment health include condition-based maintenance, asset life modeling, and root cause analysis, which will be described in subsequent blog articles.
2. Retained domain expertise
Another big challenge in the industry is the tight labor market. It is becoming increasingly harder to hire experienced operational personnel, which leads to inconsistent performance from new crew members.
Building domain expertise into the digital twin technology is an important objective for many customers so that their best practices are built into the tool, which then guides and monitors crew members with simple and consistent instructions. Even if experienced personnel leave the company, their knowledge is retained in the digital twin.
3. Optimized supply chain
Supply chain is another major challenge for the industry. Covid has introduced significant price hikes and unpredictability that every company needs to deal with. How much equipment will fail next quarter? How many consumable components do I need to purchase? How do I know if Vendor A’s quality is better than Vendor B’s under very different operating conditions?
Operational digital twin technology can answer these questions using Asset Life Models, which can generate forecasts and also normalize asset performance across different operating conditions. This will be described in a subsequent blog article.
Conclusion
In summary, today improving equipment health, retaining domain expertise, and optimizing supply chains have become more important than ever before.
In the subsequent blog articles, we will dive into:
Who are the users of the operational digital twin? It’s not just operational team members.
What are the challenges of building and adopting an operational digital twin? We will describe some of the failures we’ve seen.
What are the right technologies for building and adopting an operational digital twin solution? They need to enable rapid, iterative development with the end users.
A rapid adoption journey and lessons learned.
Condition-based maintenance and Asset Life Model. How the field of CBM is advancing.
Stay tuned!