Page 88 - Impiantistica industriale

PLANT ENGINEERING

the electrical model including wiring. A tank with a Whether it’s the drive, flow stream or wiring: the
sensor and pump, but without an associated loop platform automatically shows all the consequences
and without the knowledge from and up to what of changes because it knows the interrelationships.
value the pump should operate, only shows half the In this way, the digital twin with all its aspects from
reality. And it takes twice as much work to plan it as the FEED phase to commissioning grows consist-
it does to operate it, because in a tool chain, each ently into a single unit that continuously reveals the
compartment system must be fed individually, even enormous treasure trove of plant knowledge.
with the inevitable changes. Interrelationships are
not recognisable, not to mention consistent data In this way, the digital twin with
navigation. The maintenance staff must later gather
the relevant information from several sources. all its aspects from the FEED
“phase to commissioning
Tool chains are also the reason why the inevitable grows consistently into a single
plant changes, for example due to repairs, often
do not reach the documentation at all or only in- unit that continuously reveals
adequately. Consistent updating in various special the enormous treasure trove of
tools is very time-consuming and error-prone. If plant knowledge
only paper documentation or dead PDFs are avail-
able, and these are already overloaded with the red
entries of previous changes, the current status can Twin instead of older sister
be hard to discern. This is particularly fatal in the This unity in EB’s data model also makes it consid-
event of an incident, but also when a conversion is erably easier to keep the as-built documentation
pending or a new operating licence is due after a alive and up-to-date as a digital twin. Technicians
shutdown phase. can use EB Mobile View, a web service-based app,
to pull all the relevant data for each area of the plant
Unity in the data model onto a mobile device in an instant instead of having
to painstakingly search for it. In addition, the app
For this reason Aucotec has developed a coop- allows change information to be entered directly on
eration platform that with its versatile data model the objects via redlining and fed back to engineer-
combines all core engineering disciplines in one ing, so that the twin does not become the older
SSoT. Each item exists only once in the Engineer- sister of the plant with only a sorry resemblance,
ing Base (EB) library and each discipline can spec- but earns its name. If OPC UA-capable devices are
ify it from its perspective at any time. At the same installed in the plant, they can even communicate
time, everyone sees what the other disciplines directly with EB and thus report their existence or
have already worked on and builds directly on it. modification to the digital twin. This means that the

From the FEED phase and
P&IDs to detail engineering
and automation, the digital
twin grows together in EB’s
central data model

82 82 Impiantistica Italiana - Maggio-Giugno 2022