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Digital twins enable visualization of industrial plant or infrastructure assets across the entire asset lifecycle. This includes tracking changes during design and build, and performing analysis to optimize asset performance during operate and maintain.
Bentley's infrastructure digital twins combine engineering data, reality data, and IoT data for a holistic view of infrastructure above and below ground. Immersive visualization and analytics help users achieve a deeper understanding of their assets for more informed decisions and improved outcomes.
Bentley Digital Twins Workshop
During the ARC Industry Forum "Driving Digital Transformation in Industry and Cities" in February, Bentley Systems hosted a workshop “Improving Resilience of Industrial, Infrastructure, and City Assets” with Bob Mankowski, VP Digital Cities, Bentley, and Alan Kiraly, SVP Asset & Network Performance, Bentley. They provided an informative discussion on the strategies for Bentley’s digital twin and user successes.
The type of information that forms the digital twin involves three different technology domain areas: information technology (IT), operating technology (OT), and engineering technology (ET). This approach provides a comprehensive model to understand the attributes and performance of the system.
Digital Twins for Improved Performance
Bob Mankowski commented, “Our definition of a digital twin starts with it being a virtual replica of an asset, or a process, or a system, where an asset could be a specific process step or an entire plant.” Ultimately, the digital twin helps make better decisions about the planning, design, building, and operation of infrastructure. A digital twin needs to be kept up to date for an accurate reflection of the physical world. Then, the ability to make decisions based on that digital twin continuously improves with ongoing enhancements for accuracy – either in the model or in the associated data. That physical system provides more data back into the digital twin to update and improve the model.
The state of the practice in infrastructure today is to build a lot of 3d files for the infrastructure over many iterations. Unfortunately, that has not been a great way of tracking change throughout the whole process. A better alternative is the technology supporting digital twins with continuous updating and tracking the changes over time. Then, the twin can confidently be applied to generate insights, simulation models, analytical models, and numerical analysis.
Digital twins enable organizations operating, maintaining and/or upgrading process plants to increase asset performance and reduce operating costs through everyday use with trusted plant information. Working in an immersive digital model enables collaboration to gain invaluable insights from the data to make fast and substantiated maintenance, reliability, production, and engineering decisions.
Creating the 3D Model for Digital Twins
Modern 3D engineering design software provides the dimensionally accurate 3D model for the basis of a digital twin. New plants and infrastructure are designed using this type of software that provides the initial steps for building the digital twin.
Other plants may just have 2D paper “blueprints” or CAD documentation that have not been kept up to date with upgrades and modifications. Here, 3D laser scanning provides the dimensionally accurate representation of the assets. Additionally, mapping and surveying technologies using digital photography with drones or hand-held cameras are gaining rapid adoption to develop digital context for digital twins. Photogrammetry software provides an automated means to create the 3D model by knitting together 3 or more photos (10’s and even 100’s of thousands of photos can be used) to create the 3D reality model. It uses photos that overlap and identifies key points to stitch them together to create an accurate geometric representation. If an area needs improvement, it can be refined with additional photos.
Field workers continuously capture data about assets that is put into siloed applications with limited visibility, and the GIS is an example. Bentley Systems iTwin Services makes it possible to access and aggregate data from existing systems and silos to provide a single view or digital twin of the asset. This validates the data-based information from other systems and makes it useful beyond the capability of one system alone. With reality models, QR codes, for example, can be used to identify the specific asset, get the tag of that asset, and link that specific geometry and visual representation to the asset information in the digital twin.
Recommendations
Digital twins apply across the asset management lifecycle in project design and build, and in operate and maintain.
- Asset builders should apply project digital twins to help achieve the leading KPIs for a project, i.e., completion on-time, in-budget, and within specifications. Also, provide continuous handover of project digital twin information for use by the performance digital twin in operations and maintenance.
- Asset owners should use performance digital twins to reduce unplanned downtime that typically has fast payback and easy justification with increased revenue. Then, build on that success with equipment operational improvements and energy management.
- For both projects and operations, faster and better decision making is achievable with the greater number of people accessing more the accurate and understandable information in context of the digital twin.