Asset Performance and Digital Twin Technology

How modla's platform and a digital twin can work together to deliver live value adding insights.
Asset Performance and Digital Twin Technology

Asset performance is a crucial aspect for organizations, as it directly impacts their operations and overall productivity. By using asset performance digital twins, organizations can monitor, predict, and improve the performance of their physical assets such as machines, equipment, and facilities in real time.

Introduction

Digital twin technology is a rapidly growing field. In the Asset Management discipline, it has the potential to revolutionize the way organizations manage their assets, strategy and decision making. It is a virtual representation of a physical asset, process, or system that allows organizations to monitor and analyze their operations in real-time. The digital twin is created using data collected from sensors, data, inspection results, and many other sources, and is constantly updated to reflect the latest information about the asset.

By creating a virtual representation of physical assets, organizations can monitor their operations in real-time and identify areas for improvement. This includes many different use cases, such as strategy, spares, maintenance, capital planning.... the list goes on. Digital twin technology enables organizations to run simulations and predictive analytics to make data-driven decisions that can improve asset as well as business performance. These improvements can include increased efficiency gains, reduced downtime, and improved asset utilization and optimization.

Modla provides asset analytics and digital twin services to help organizations improve in this space. Our platform is designed to give organizations a comprehensive view of their assets, as they understand them. This enables them to make data-driven decisions that drive better business outcomes. Our services include predictive analytics, asset modelling, and knowledge first architectures.

What is an Asset Performance Management (APM)?

A broad range of solutions with different feature sets and functionalities are all categorised as APM solutions. While confusing, at their core, they all aim to maximise the value added by operational assets. This is achieved by increasing availability, minimising maintenance costs or reducing the risk of failure through better visibility and analytics. In addition, the solutions typically provide a framework to implement and ensure relevant standards and regulations are conformed to.

What is a digital twin?

A digital twin is a virtual adaptation of a process, system, or a product. The scope of digital twins are near limitless and at present implementations are only scratching the surface of its potential. Ultimately digital twins act as a conduit that allows us to scrutinize physical entities from a computer. In the context of asset management, a digital twin could portray the relationship between the environment, condition, and operational context of an asset and its associated risk of failure and cost to the business.

The technology and its expected benefits extend into the domains of Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). Digital twins are constantly evolving as these technologies mature. However, digital twins are not yet the high high-fidelity real-time simulations everyone expects.

To put its current limitations in context, we need to understand what degrees of freedom are. In statistics degrees of freedom describe the number of independent variables which are free to vary in a calculation. Conservatively a digital twin model of a complete aircraft frame has a trillion degrees of freedom. To simulate such a complex system in real-time is not a trivial task. Not even for the fastest computers in the world.

Fortunately, most businesses do not need to simulate an aircraft or any system nearly as complex. Even simple digital twins are immensely powerful and represent a strong competitive differentiator if employed correctly. In the context of asset management, the coupling of condition monitoring data, maintenance history, and historical fleet data allow digital twins to paint a clear of an asset’s health, improving safety and reliability.

Benefits of using digital twin technology for asset performance

One of the key benefits of using digital twin technology for asset performance is increased efficiency. By monitoring assets in real-time, organizations can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions that increase efficiency and reduce downtime. This can result in a more productive operation and a significant improvement in overall asset performance.

Another benefit of digital twin technology is improved asset utilization and optimization. With a virtual representation of physical assets, organizations can simulate different scenarios and make data-driven decisions that optimize asset utilization. This can result in improved overall asset performance and a more efficient operation.

Digital twin technology can also help organizations minimize their maintenance and capital costs. By understanding the current context of their assets, and identifying areas for improvement, organizations can make data-driven decisions that are specific to them.

Overall, this combination of increased efficiency, reduced downtime, improved asset utilization and optimization, and minimized maintenance costs can result in a significant improvement in overall asset performance. Digital twins are an amalgamation of your organisations current understanding.

Modla's asset analytics and digital twin services

Our brand provides asset analytics and digital twin services to help organizations improve their asset performance. Our services include analytics, asset modelling, integration with other systems, and knowledge first architectures. These are all uniquely designed to help organizations achieve their goals.

Our platform provides a comprehensive view of assets and their performance by aggregating data from a variety of sources, including sensors, data warehouses, and other systems. This data is then analyzed in real-time to provide organizations with a complete view of their assets and their performance. Then we pass this information to our analytics, which allows organizations to make data-driven decisions based on defined processes and methods.

Our services have helped numerous organizations across various industries improve their asset performance. For example, a leading manufacturing company used our platform to monitor the performance of its pumping stations. By leveraging our analytics, the company was able to reduce expected expenditure and remove non value-add maintenance tasks, resulting in a significantly decreased lifecycle costs.

Digital twin technology offers numerous benefits for asset performance, including increased efficiency and reduced downtime, improved asset utilization and optimization, minimization of maintenance costs, and improved overall asset performance.

What distinguishes a digital twin from predictive analytics?

A digital twin is a platform that incorporates and displays information. Ultimately the amalgamation of every analysis and data point portrays a complete picture of the asset. In an ideal world, a digital twin is not measuring or reporting on a few metrics, it is a like for like representation of its physical counterpart which allows for any type of analysis to be performed on demand, and the results displayed. This includes predictive analytics as a subset.

The missing piece.

Data from sensors, asset information, condition information, operational information and more, are fed into a digital twin. Our approach combines this information, analyses it, then displays recommendations and findings in an intuitive graphical manner. The overall business context of the asset must be considered when deciding on an appropriate course of action. Our asset management platform bridges the gap between raw data and information, and actionable strategies conscious of business constraints and context.

How does modla work with digital twin applications?

In today's rapidly changing and data-driven business environment, it's more important than ever for organizations to have a comprehensive view of their assets and their performance. Our brand's asset analytics and digital twin services can provide organizations with the insights they need to optimize their operations and drive business success.

Modla is an analytical engine, that when combined with asset models, provides live recommendations and analytics:

  • Generate optimal maintenance strategies tailored to your assets and operational context
  • Generate operational strategies that balance performance and asset life expectancy
  • Generate intervention strategies such as replacement and refurbishment schedules
  • Output risk profiles and inform risk management initiatives
  • Predict spare usage and recommend appropriate stock levels
  • Develop budgets for any scenario
  • Develop dynamic task lists
  • + more...

How is Modla different?

While Modla has the same fundamental goal, our vision addresses a few key gaps. Unlike other tools, which lock you into a rigid process and one type of analysis (e.g. Monte-carlo, MILP, condition based, risk based, value based etc.), Modla can utilise all of these approaches. It evolves as your organisation matures. The modla platform can be used for simple prioritisation and rules based approaches, all the way through to a prescriptive system that utilises optimisation techniques and AI. Our solution has been developed to accompany you on your asset management journey. We enable you to implement processes familiar to you and ramp up the complexity steadily over time. We pride ourselves on our ability to create analytical solutions to your specific problems.

Secondly, our platform has the ability to optimise across OPEX and CAPEX to establish an optimal TOTEX strategy for an asset or system. We're enabling optimisation across maintenance and renewals at the activity level to ensure you derive the most value from your assets over their entire life cycle.

Lastly, we capture SME and asset knowledge in a manner allowing you to leverage its value in an automated manner. Our offering bridges the gap between asset data and executable strategies by codifying the manner in which your SMEs would utilise and even share data. Our objective is not to replace resources, but free up their time to better focus their efforts.

For organizations looking to improve the performance of their assets and drive business success, we invite you to try our asset analytics and digital twin services. With our cutting-edge technology and expertise, we can help you monitor, optimize, and predict the performance of your assets and take your organization to the next level.