Industrial Automation Magazine India

Digital twin completely changes the paradigm

Published on : Monday 23-09-2019

Bentley is synonymous with software for infrastructure, BIM in particular. What will be the impact of Digital Twins in this case?

It is interesting looking at it from infrastructure perspective, and more importantly if you go back a few years, people were talking about BIM (building information modelling) a lot. BIM was good when we were looking from a project delivery perspective as it helped a lot to understand how the project design happens and manage the assets. Digital twin completely changes the paradigm in terms of how you are going to operate your facilities. The way we work today has changed completely, thanks to information available through digital technology. What’s important in such a scenario is how we make use of this information, make it accessible for people to make decisions. It is more of giving insights to people, offering them a predictive model, and that’s where digital twin comes in. You still have a baseline of information coming either from BIM or other sources, but how to make use of it – this is what digital twin is all about – it changes the whole way of working together.

Please elaborate upon the collaboration with Siemens and the PlantSight digital cloud services.

PlantSight services will be rolled out now but we have some EAPs (early access programmes) already – a few clients using it for a while. Because when developing something new, it is not created in silos and all of a sudden given as ready to use. At the conceptualisation stage itself PlantSight was given to a few owner operators to use it and in turn received inputs from them about performance and expectations. Since this is cloud based, it is very easy to make changes as you do not have to start all over again. So we have been working with the users for a while now.

So what is the feedback and how has the industry responded to it?

A lot of users have started getting value from it, specially the examples shown during the presentation about bringing the sensors data. Typically in industry there are always situations happening, say a red light blinking which may not trigger an immediate action as it is presumed to be routine. Actually it may be serious, but there is no action. With PlantSight all the information comes together and one may actually see the alarm blinking and relate it to the pump to which it is connected and see that the pump is likely to fail, and what could be the impact if it fails, how serious will be the resultant problem. All this information will now be at the fingertips with PlantSight.

So how different is this from what Siemens offers under its MindSphere platform?

That’s a good question! PlantSight is actually using a lot of underlying technologies from both Bentley and Siemens, and MindSphere is one of them. For example the views of the digital engineering models leverage the Bentley OpenPlant and COMOS information, but getting data from the sensors part is used from MindSphere. Apps and tools from MindSphere are used in PlantSight, which is also using the platform, but not exclusively so. MindSphere can be expanded much wider beyond just plant operation for many more things like inventory and production management, etc. So PlantSight is combining technologies from both companies, leveraging various tools to create a consolidated new offering. The value users get is, there is no need to install different types of software. It is a cloud based app and everything is ready and templatised for them.

Since Bentley was always more into infrastructure software, how old is this engagement with process industry?

Bentley has a long association with process industry since its formation in 1984. Over the years we have had 3D modelling services like PlantSpace for engineering and design of process plants. We also had solutions for asset performance management (APM) for the process industry; similarly asset information management, so we have been into process industry for a while now. However, from digital transformation perspective, PlantSight is the most significant initiative.

The Bentley digital twin is said to be different. How different is this?

This again is an interesting point, because when we talk to the market we see people focussing on one aspect of digital twin, say the process twin or an automation twin. So people are focussing on just a part of the digital twin. When Bentley talks of digital twin we categorise it into two major components – the project delivery twin, how you create the asset like the construction design, etc; and the performance digital twin, which is how the asset will perform. When you say asset performance, it will also mean how the process simulation will happen, e.g., what happens when the composition of crude changes in a refining plant? The chemicals will change and there is a need to simulate that. So this is what a performance twin is all about. It is a higher subset, and if I have to draw a block diagram I would say digital twin is the whole, then it is divided into two – the project delivery twin and the performance twin, with further division in the performance twin – it is a more holistic approach.

During the presentation most slides of projects shown were from abroad. What are the current Bentley projects in India?

There are a lot of projects we are working on, among them the Nagpur and Pune Metro where we are leveraging the digital twins. Similarly we are engaged with a few refineries. Then there is Cairn-Vedanta, and they had presented a paper last year and are again doing it this year about how they are leveraging Bentley technologies. Several government organisations are also using Bentley technologies. Now the reason why most of the slides are from outside India is because there are client sensitivities involved in putting these in public domain!

A final question – with such technologies available, will the infrastructure segment in India get a boost?

From a technology perspective Bentley brings a lot of value to the table. The transparency ensures information is available to the stakeholders to make the right decisions. The Nagpur and Pune Metro projects are good examples on how to work with the supply chains. Also the other advantage is when resources are scarce, project optimisation automatically becomes more important and there is a lot of attention paid to improving efficiencies.