Abstract
Researchers have proposed various models for assessing design alternatives for process plant retrofits. Due to the considerable engineering effort involved, no such models exist for the great majority of brownfield process plants, which have been in operation for years or decades. This article proposes a semi-automatic methodology for generating a digital twin of a brownfield plant. The methodology consists of: (1) extracting information from piping and instrumentation diagrams, (2) converting the information to a graph format, (3) applying graph algorithms to preprocess the graph, (4) generating a simulation model from the graph, (5) performing manual expert editing of the generated model, (6) configuring the calculations done by simulation model elements and (7) parameterizing the simulation model according to recent process measurements in order to obtain a digital twin. Since previous work exists for steps (1–2), this article focuses on defining the methodology for (3–5) and demonstrating it on a laboratory process. A discussion is provided for (6–7). The result of the case study was that only few manual edits needed to be made to the automatically generated simulation model. The paper is concluded with an assessment of open issues and topics of further research for this 7-step methodology.
Highlights
Industrial process plants in sectors such as oil & gas, chemical, pulp & paper, power & heat, mineral processing, and water supply management have lifecycles of several decades
The great great majority majorityofofmanual manualengineering engineering work automated respect to generating the flowsheet work waswas automated withwith respect to generating the flowsheet of steady the steady state model.ItItwas wasdiscovered discovered that work that could not be involved of the state model
The target of the paper was to achieve a POC for the automatic generation of a steady state
Summary
Industrial process plants in sectors such as oil & gas, chemical, pulp & paper, power & heat, mineral processing, and water supply management have lifecycles of several decades. Retrofits offer a large potential for reductions in operating costs [1], energy consumption [2], CO2 emissions [3], freshwater consumption [4], and environmental pollution [5]. The said authors proposed various kinds of models for assessing these reductions at design phase. No such models exist for the great majority of brownfield process plants, due to the considerable engineering effort involved [6]. In this article a brownfield is defined as an operating plant, which has existing physical structures and legacy software systems. The plant design information at a brownfield plant is generally not in digital format [7]
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