BHGE & KBC Partner to Provide Software Solutions to the Oil & Gas Industry

Baker Hughes, a GE company, and KBC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yokogawa Electric Corporation, announced a preferred partnership that will provide a combination of process simulation, asset performance management and operational software solutions to the oil and gas industry.

Leveraging GE’s Predix platform for the industrial internet, this partnership extends KBC’s Petro-SIM process simulation modeling further into the fullstream oil and gas value chain, and provides connectivity between operations, assets, people and business processes for end-to-end optimization.

Integrating KBC technology with BHGE’s suite of digital solutions will allow customers to help reduce bottlenecks in facilities, processes and equipment to help achieve more optimal production and lower risk. By integrating data analytics connected by workflows between facilities and operations, the time spent to analyze operations can be reduced and the insight gained will help to increase production, reduce energy usage and improve product quality consistency.

KBC’s Petro-SIM simulation technology already connects to cloud-based Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) data-as-a-service solutions to remotely monitor and help improve customers’ process operations. With integration to commercial data historian and database systems, the KBC technology offers a central repository for process topology, and stream and equipment data, with access to live and historical plant operating data for performance monitoring. Asset Performance Management (APM) from GE helps to enables intelligent asset strategies to further optimize performance to make operations safer by helping to predict and prevent failures. It can help to answer questions on the history and current operation of an asset, as well as provide direction as to what actions should be taken to improve performance, mitigate risk and ensure operational safety and efficiency.

The integration of KBC process simulation and models with BHGE analytics, digital twins, fullstream software and Predix helps to provide real-time congruence between the digital and physical worlds. A plant digital twin, enabled by this partnership, would provide a view of equipment, operations and processes, comparing actual performance to expected outcomes, and helping to enable predictive actions. This plant twin will also enable more efficient workforce management, allowing personnel to focus on critical plant operations.

Keywords: Process Simulation, Asset Performance, Cloud-Based, Data Analytics, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Data-As-A-Service, ARC Advisory Group.