DORIS, AVEVA and Schneider Electric to create digital twin solutions for oil and gas sector

Paris based engineering and project management firm DORIS Group, energy management and automation solutions provider Schneider Electric and industrial software solutions provider AVEVA, have partnered to develop digital twin technologies for the oil and gas sector.

The creation of the digital twins will help oil and gas organisations improve asset performance, increase sustainability and maximize return on capital on projects, according to a statement.

“A digital twin is the foundation of a digital transformation that optimizes production, detects equipment problems before failure occurs, uncovers new opportunities for process improvement, along with reducing unplanned downtime,” Venkatraman Swaminathan, vice president and country GM, secure power division, Schneider Electric India, told TechCircle.

Swaminathan added that the backbone of digital twins consists of IoT (internet of things) devices, AI (artificial intelligence), data analytics, which gets inputs from sensors gathering data from a real-world existing process/system.

Read: Schneider Electric launches edge infrastructure-focused CoE in Bengaluru 

The three companies are expected to bring their engineering, lifestyle software expertise and digital specialization to create a digital twin that would serve as the backbone for the upstream oil and gas sector.

According to Swaminathan, running digital twin systems involves implementing new technologies that require edge computing, some of whose core components are designed and deployed in India. 

“Schneider Electric provides complete, pre-integrated industrial edge computing solutions – Ecostruxure Micro Data Center that industrial system integrators can quickly deploy and easily manage at customer sites,” added Swaminathan. 

“We already have this solution in place and running in Schneider Electric’s Smart Manufacturing Units and also with some of the key industrial customers,” pointed out Swaminathan, with one such smart factory being deployed in Bengaluru a few months ago. 

Once deployed, the new solution will help organisations bring onboard new assets through cloud enabled software, that could improve efficiencies, provide better safety, improve traceability and enable remote operations and production assurance through the digital twin.

Oil and gas operators struggle to go digital due to the lack of a structured offering and orchestration as there is no single vendor who can provide a 360 degree solution. Another pain point is with large amounts of data from various sources. Additionally, the oil and gas sector is also under considerable pressure to quantify, track and reduce CO2 emissions, which can be a difficult proposition with limited technologies and manpower.

“A digital twin is a complete 360-degree replica of a physical asset such as pipelines, gathering systems, heat exchangers, turbines, pumps, compressors or entire plants that enables modelling of process and control, and monitoring of equipment health,” Swaminathan told TechCircle.

He added that the digital twin would also help oil and gas companies discover additional unattained potential uplift, identify and resolve bottlenecks preventing extra uplift all while improving field workforce efficiency.

Read: AI, engineering design and cybersecurity top priorities for organisations: AVEVA

DORIS, Aveva and Rueil-Malmaison, France based Schneider Electric will offer a structured digital and collaborative solution across the lifecycle of projects to help the oil and gas owners solve these challenges.

“Combining our complementary expertise will go a long way to providing a powerful enabler to offer our customers embarking on their digital transformational journeys with optimized solutions throughout their assets' lifecycle,” Christophe Debouvry, CEO of DORIS Group said.