Agnostic Interoperability for a Sustainable Open Asset Digital Twin

Keywords: ExxonMobil, ARC Industry Leadership Forum, Open Asset Digital Twin Working Group, Data, Ecosystem, Interoperability, Sustainable, ARC Advisory Group.

Overview

At the 28th annual ARC Industry Leadership Forum in Orlando, the session on the Open Digital Twin Ecosystem ignited audience interest. ARC’s Peter Reynolds introduced the topic and deftly moderated this session. The thrust of the keynote presentation by ExxonMobil’s Michael Hotaling, Operations Excellence Digital Manager, was on agnostic interoperability as a catalyst for a sustainable open asset digital twin. At the outset he thanked the Open Asset Digital Twin Working Group that provides a forum for asset owners to collaborate, articulate users' needs, and speak in a unified voice to help vendors see opportunities in an "open" approach to the digital twin ecosystem. 

Digital twins improve collaboration but need a significant overhaul to become “open.” Openness ensures interoperability of data and technologies to ensure cost-effective, scalable, and sustainable solutions. Open asset digital twins provide a framework for connecting dataflows across silos to produce a holistic view of an asset’s information across its entire lifecycle. Most current digital twins have a single use case, but open digital twins that support multiple use cases would multiply the benefits across an enterprise. 

ExxonMobil has been building a digital reality ecosystem by working toward open data infrastructure, cross-departmental data access, and data-driven decision making. The vision is to have something similar to OPA (Open Process Automation), which is a set of open standards for process automation architecture—for digital twins. All stakeholders along the industrial value chain need to work together to create open standards that go beyond a single digital twin or even an individual organization. This Insight captures the salient points of Michael Hotaling’s erudite presentation. 

Understanding the Open Asset Digital Twin

Speaking about open asset digital twins, Michael said, “We need to look outside our own industry.” He explained that other industries already have some innovative technologies that could benefit them; so they need to learn how to adapt and enhance those to create the architectural foundation that the oil and gas industry needs. 

Michael explained that CAD models can be a source for a digital twin. If only operations and maintenance are represented, then you're missing a large part of your asset in terms of providing services. Asset contextualization plays a critical role in how and where you operate. “Now, in our journey, we think that reality first is the way to set the standard. But reality first by itself is just a ‘dumb’ picture,” said Michael. What is required are digital twins powered by reality capture and interlaced with data to increase the value of the use cases. Interoperable systems drive the mapped value use cases. In this context, Michael mentioned 50 high value cases identified at the 2020 ARC workshop and the sustainability of those high value cases continues with a multiverse of suppliers. 

The question that arises is what fidelity and frequency of information is needed to support those use cases? Approximately 75 percent of these use cases can be solved and supported with reality-based capture interlaced with data. An engineering model will be required for the remainder. The key issue is how to keep a sustainable digital twin evergreen. For this, the technology and data are available for utilization. The next step is the platform and how to get there. 

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