Enhanced Unit Monitoring Enabled by Digital Twin

Process engineers must continuously monitor the health and performance of process units. Unit monitoring ensures reliable operation of the unit, identifies disturbances early in the cycle and improves the understanding of the process. Effective unit monitoring results in the identification of short and long-term economic opportunities - usually in yield optimization, cost reduction and maximization of unit capacity.

Unit engineers use key performance indicators (KPIs) to help define and measure progress toward the plant’s business and strategic goals. Increasing process plant complexity requires more sophisticated ways of approaching KPIs and targets. This is where real-time connected technology with deeper analytics - the process digital twin - comes to the forefront, as it accounts for the multidimensional factors and nonlinear trade-offs that make effective decision making a challenge.

Read this article to understand:

• How a process digital twin drives agility and convergence in understanding actions across the whole business
• The key inputs used for a process digital twin, key tasks performed and how KPIs are calculated
• How a process digital twin is utilized for analysis, calculation and reporting to deliver a single version of the truth
• A case study of a pilot process digital twin at Saudi Aramco

This article appeared in Hydrocarbon Processing, September 2021 and is Co-Authored by Saudi Aramco.