‘Rather than digital transformation, Bentley speaks of digital advancement’
Published on : Monday 30-11--0001
An interview with Anne-Marie Walters, Global Marketing Director, Bentley Systems, responsible for the marketing and positioning of Bentley’s solutions and products in the Process, Power, and Enterprise arena.
The Oil & Gas industry is looking at improving productivity through digital technologies. How does Bentley Systems help here?
Bentley offers an open Connected Data Environment (CDE) which is a set of cloud-provisioned or on-premises services that support digital context, digital components, and digital workflows. By enabling an open CDE, firms can better manage and access consistent, trusted, and accurate information. Project delivery firms and owner-operators in the oil and gas industry can share the benefits of an open, integrated, and connected framework to enable collaboration, improve decision making, and deliver better project outcomes and better performing assets in terms of safety, reliability and profitability.
What does the term ‘As Operated Digital Twin’ signify and how different it is from plain digital twin? How will this help bridge the IT-OT divide?
A digital twin is a digital representation of a physical asset, process or system, as well as the information that allows us to understand and model its performance. Typically, a digital twin can be continuously synchronised from multiple sources, including sensors and continuous surveying, to represent its near real-time status, working condition or position. In various infrastructure and industrial sectors, digital twins are used to optimise the operation and maintenance of physical assets, systems, and manufacturing processes.
Plainly stated, a digital twin is a highly detailed digital model that is the counterpart (or twin) of a physical asset. Connected sensors on the physical asset collect data that can be mapped onto the digital model. Anyone looking at the digital twin can now see crucial information about how the physical asset is performing in the real world.
The “as-operated digital twin” is an exact digital model of the current physical asset and is usually captured using reality modelling (continuously surveying) so that it truly reflects the as-is conditions. Quite often the 3D CAD rendition of an asset, typically created during design, is considered a digital twin (we refer to this as the engineering digital twin). This type of digital model does not reflect the actual physical condition which can be quite different especially in the oil and gas industry, where small bore piping or wiring is not often modelled. By having both the as-operated digital twin and engineering digital twin available and synchronised, other information can be referenced without error or ambiguity creating an accurate and trusted bridge between IT and OT.
Will the user industry be able to integrate this as part of their digital transformation?
Rather than digital transformation, Bentley speaks of digital advancement, which refers to the adoption of digital technologies, combining digital context, digital workflows and digital components, to enable better, more rapid and reliable decisions about projects or operating assets. In digital workflows, data captured or created for one purpose is accessed by software for other purposes, saving time, minimising rework, and improving data quality over the asset lifecycle.
Information mobility is fundamental to realising the benefits of digitalisation, reflecting the reuse of information throughout the design-build-operate lifecycle for infrastructure projects and assets, and enabling data generated by one software application to be used by another application for digital feedback loops or for cross-discipline workflows.
Bentley offers a digital advancement framework to help user organisations assess their own digital maturity and understand the best practices to adopt by going digital to advance asset performance and project delivery.
How does the Bentley-Siemens cloud service help realise the implementation?
Bentley’s iTwinTM Services are digital twin cloud services that help organisations create and curate digital twins of their projects and assets. iTwinTM Services are provisioned within Bentley’s Connected Data Environment which is, in itself, an open environment bringing information together from multiple sources. User can leverage the CDE through Bentley applications that all share this environment.
PlantSightTM is a recently announced solution jointly developed by Bentley and Siemens for the oil, gas and process industries that leverages iTwinTM Services. With PlantSightTM as-operated digital twin cloud services, operational and project-related engineering data is aligned seamlessly. All disciplines and stakeholders have immediate access to consistent representations. Especially for brownfield installations, the time and effort to federate and complete asset information will be significantly reduced, with plant documentation kept up to date, and its quality accordingly improved.
What about the cyber security aspect?
Bentley’s digital twin cloud services leverage the Microsoft Azure platform, and users, thus, benefit from the extensive security and protections this platform provides.
Ms Walters, a chartered chemical engineer, represents Bentley on the board of the Construction Industry Institute and is also heavily engaged in the activities of FIATECH. She is a founding member of the Process Industries STEP Consortium (PISTEP) committee and has served on the boards of CIMsteel and the United Kingdom’s chapter of the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI).