How can digital twins transform decision making?
Digital twins replicate processes, hardware, and assets to simulate their behaviours and reactions. As you can imagine, that offers incredible potential for richer understanding of how things function and respond, providing rich answers to vital questions:
- What would happen if…?
- What is happening?
- What is going to happen?
The potential of digital twins
Digital twins revolutionise asset monitoring. Rather than simply providing a series of metrics and readouts, the digital twin creates a replica of the asset in question. It’s no wonder why the digital twin market in oil & gas is expected to grow 11.2% between 2025 and 2034, and reach a value of USD3.6bn.
Asset monitoring with digital twins
Before digital twins, asset monitoring and diagnostics was limited to selected metrics. A digital twin means you can look at the whole asset through its 3D digital replica. They are not dealing with numbers on a readout, but a dynamic representation of the asset in question. Obviously, that offers much more detailed and specific data about the asset, along with a visualisation of what is happening, not merely a snapshot numerical expression.
Digital twins for predictive maintenance
The depth of insight from digital twins allows maintenance to shift profoundly from cure to prevention. For example, if the data indicates that the stress patterns on a certain area suggest an unexpected or unacceptable rate of deterioration, then the asset owner can reinforce the necessary area or make different engineering choices to change the impact on that area. The reduction in repair costs, and the savings from preventing work stoppages can be substantial — 20% in some cases.
The current and potential impact of digital twins
- 27% of key Oil & Gas stakeholders have already adopted digital twin technology
- A single oil rig could prevent $3.24m worth of down time every month by using digital twins
- Oil & Gas businesses are using digital twins to better assess the environmental impact of their operations, in order to design more effective sustainability strategies
With IoT, AI, and advanced analytics, businesses can create digital twins of reservoirs, rigs, pipelines, and even whole supply chains. They can not only optimise the operations of their assets, but training in them too. Teams can use digital twins for learning and development, with digital environments that allow experimentation and learning by doing that would be impossible, impractical, expensive, or dangerous in the real world. Employees can gain deeper experience more quickly, safely, and economically, leading to better outcomes and far more skilled staff.
How to lay the foundation for digital twin technology
The groundwork for digital twin technology is data management. You must know how the data will be used, where it will be stored, who has access to it, and how it can drive value. Especially because they incorporate tools like AI, which are rendered useless or even dangerous by poor quality data, digital twins require a robust Data Governance framework. Without that, you risk having digital distortions instead of digital twins, and making decisions based on an inaccurate picture of reality.
Speak to the data experts at Agile to discuss how to unlock data’s power for digital twins. Call 01908 010618 or contact us here.