To deliver tomorrow’s energy more sustainably, efficiently and safely, to maximise income, facilitate the sustainable and diversified expansion of the Kingdom’s economy, and to enable a globally competitive and vibrant Saudi energy sector, Saudi Aramco realised the needs for digital transformation. As part of Aramco’s initiative for digital intelligence strategy and transformation of all project information, there are ongoing efforts about delivering Engineering, Procurement and Construction innovative solutions to create a new model of executing projects in a digital, smart and cost-effective approach. This is implemented under the Digital Twin integrated approach.
The revolutionary development becomes the new norm for engineering and construction to reduce cost of capital projects. Digital Twin is a replica of physical asset developed at early stages to provide efficiency in design, construction and operations and to enable incremental handover not only of physical assets but also their created digital replicas. This progressive handover will allow Aramco to digitalise capital projects processes and to achieve a virtual representation of the project using various integrated digital solutions. All project business processes, engineering design data and equipment details will be digitalised, integrated and virtually presented under Project Digital Twin. This digital replica enables accumulating the realised benefits across the asset lifespan, from improved spatial context to providing a living framework for operational data management. Also, looking at this as a single version of truth, therefore unlocking the potential of breaking the siloes of technical information and integrating the business of asset operation into the enterprise level optimisations.
By looking at the digital engineering, smart construction and progressive handover in a new way, Aramco have achieved many benefits, and here are a few representative examples:
- Building the Asset Information Base necessary to eliminate attributes duplication from different sources
- A data centric approach based on single database and data classification
- Consistent equipment tags coding and mapping which simplify commissioning efforts
- Integrated information model for engineering, planning and cost estimation
- organised project information in a structured way, thus reflecting a standardised plant breakdown structure
- Simplified information retrieval of different disciplines data from one platform
- Validation of construction sequence and cumulative project cost by timeline and activities
- Visualising information in different formats and forms by context
- Automated validation of required data and compliance to selected standards and guidelines of Aramco
- Accurate reporting of data progress and completeness
- Digital Progressive handover to eliminate rework and task reassignments
- Enabling remote, Immersive and collaborative review of all project stakeholders at early stage of the project
- Single interface that serves as a vital source of truth of all project data
- Enabling live progress reporting and smart construction tools to optimise site activities
The strategy followed during this development of Digital Twin allows for the delivery of a more mature and accurate design in the early stages of industrial projects that eventually leads to improving cost and enhancing performance, while helping meet financial targets and satisfaction expectations. As the Digital Twin evolves from the Project stage to Operations and Maintenance stage, its maturity level also grows along the way as more and more real time and static data are cumulatively added to its models.
The aim of Digital Twin is to build a strong foundation for a longer-term digitisation roadmap until reaching the Future Digital Plant with 8 dimensions for sustainable, predictive and optimised operations.
The Digital Twin is meant to progressively elaborated during the Project starting from Design, Project Execution to Digital Plant – part I. Then it will be extended by adding the Digital Plant – Part II to complete the holistic model of the Digital Twin System. The Progression Stages are illustrated in Aramco Digital Twin best practice and reflected in the following pyramid:
Aramco captured the list of lessons learned of Digital Twin first implementations, that included proof-of-concept trials, to small scale and partial deployments, and used those lessons to develop their governing standards for the requirement, and to incrementally replicate success and address challenges at planning stages.
As a collaborative effort we provide our top recommendations of implementing Digital Twin:
Early implementations
It is strongly advised that early implementations of Digital Twin to commence from the beginning of the FEED stages, and this will unlock all Digital Twin potential features from the beginning of the design and will extend to cover the full lifecycle.
Familiarity with the solution
It is highly recommended that the project team shall receive the required training early on to become more familiar with the Digital Twin tools so that they can use it throughout the project. By increasing their familiarity with the Digital Twin, the project team can efficiently use it as a standard tool for design review and data validation.
Digital Twin as a standard tool
The project team can save a lot of software licenses and increase collaboration when the Digital Twin is used as a single standard tool for estimation, planning, process simulation and document management. It can be the main tool to manage information, deliverables development, submission and review altogether.
