Industry leaders are creating a groundswell of support around the need for sustainable and open digital twins and separating data from software. A new breed of open and interoperable digital twins is needed to accommodate the variety of applications and businesses. The implications for this new initiative are far-reaching into the operating and business systems of process manufacturing and their technology suppliers.
The Digital Twins Lifecycle Is Currently Broken
Digital twins have the opportunity to deliver significant value through the entire asset lifecycle, from design and construction to operations and maintenance, while optimizing and automating associated business processes. To date, the focus of digital twins has been on the engineering and construction (E&C) portion of the lifecycle, with technology solution providers making digital twins for engineering design and building infrastructure. The complex operate and maintain portion of the lifecycle has been effectively disconnected from design and build stages, leaving huge opportunities for cost savings in an underserved market.
Whil digital twins improve collaboration, they need a significant overhaul to become truly “open.” Openness ensures the interoperability of data and technologies to provide cost-effective, scalable, and sustainable solutions. Sustainable Asset Digital Twins will give a framework for connecting dataflows across silos to produce a holistic view of an asset’s information across its entire lifecycle. Asset owners want to eliminate barriers to integrating and contextualizing disparate data sets while optimizing and automating business processes.
About ARC's Open Asset Digital Twins Working Group
The Open Asset Digital Twins working group (WG) provides a forum for asset owners whose purpose is to collaborate, articulate users' needs, and speak in a focused voice to help vendors overcome the limitations of digital twins. Together, the WG will align on key industry needs and challenges and share consistent messaging with vendors on that topic so that they can support users more effectively. The WG will help vendors see opportunities to play and be profitable in an "open" approach to the digital twin ecosystem and address gaps in the data and workflows across the asset lifecycle, which causes losses in productivity, quality, and sustainability.
Benefits of Joining the Open Asset Digital Twins Working Group
- Influence suppliers to see opportunities to play and be profitable in an open digital twin ecosystem
- Amplified (multi-user) common voice to suppliers, improve supplier offerings
- Continuity in discussions and progress to common goals
- Agnostic, 3rd party voice to suppliers, avoiding the legal appearance of any collusion
- Exchange of knowledge (process, discrete, and hybrid industries)
- Access to the market and influence as a group
- Compile best practices, establish critical input/feedback criteria from other users
Guidance and Priorities for Digital Twin Suppliers, EPCs, and System Integrators
The scope of the WG will provide clear guidance on priorities and needs to facilitate digital twin technology and accelerate adoption, thus creating value by using these capabilities to lead to more efficient operating processes and in upgrades and turnarounds for the process manufacturers. The WG believes a focus on the delivery of digital twin technology will be necessary, including continued analysis of costs for maintaining models and what types of organizations and capabilities are needed to sustain the value, the interoperability with other business solutions, and to mitigate the apparent implementation and deployment risk. One area of guidance would include capturing, storing, delivering, and maintaining 3D visualization including seamless integration of real-time trusted engineering data and reality capture, as part of a future open and sustainable digital twin.
Akin to similar industry initiatives, like the Open Process Automation Forum (OPAF), this WG will consider many of the OPAF principles, promote the needs for operators and asset owners, and provide a voice for uniform messaging on critical needs and gaps. This approach is intended to assist technology suppliers to see the opportunities for participation and efficiently deliver projects in an "open" digital twin environment while leveraging or influencing new and existing data and visualization “standards" to digital twin deployment.
| Related ARC Forum Presentation Videos |
| The Open Asset Digital Twin Ecosystem Peter Reynolds, ARC Nick Purday, ConocoPhillips Michael Hotaling, ExxonMobil Panel Discussion |
| Digital Twins Journey Through Visualization, Data Literacy & Standards Pedro Vieira, Petrobas |
| Building the Industrial Metaverse on Open Digital Twins Peter Reynolds, ARC Michael Hotaling, ExxonMobil Panel Discussion |
| Moving Toward Sustainable Asset Digital Twins Manoj Dharwadkar, Dow Michael Hotaling, ExxonMobil Panel Discussion |
For More Information
For more information on the Open Asset Digital Twins Working Group and how to join, please contact us.