How Kognitwin enabled O&G customers to maintain stable production during Covid-19

^{Issued: May 2020}

• Field / offshore manning levels down by 60-80% 
• Offices stand empty; everyone works from home 
• No travel allowed 

New ways of working have been proven possible during the Covid-19, for operators who are one step ahead in digitalization and in many cases have  adopted a digital twin solution. For those operators that had begun the journey to build a virtual representation of their facility, Covid-19 was the catalyst to accelerate the adoption and integration of this technology into their day to day workflow. With a smart dynamic digital twin, operators were able to: 

• maintain stable production, in some cases even increase production 
• dramatically increase decision making speed  
• enable remote, distributed, global teams to support business delivery  

• have rapid and pro-active collaboration between disciplines  
• have a unified toolkit for daily planning and stand ups no matter where they were located 

Let’s look at some of the examples of how Kognitwin enabled the operators to make rapid and informed decisions based on real time information, at a time when most people were working remotely:

Challenge 1: 

Ensure business continuity, collaboration and decision-making speed while teams work remotely. 

Collaborate has become a term that is more important and has more meaning to people during Cov-19. People now are distributed and there’re teams working from home, or “Corona” offices where there’re only 2-3 people allowed to be in there. Within our Kognitwin there’s an application called collaborative environment that is rich with features to enable people and teams to interact with each other around the data and information associated with their operating asset. It addresses the challenges such as distributed siloed data sources, inefficient work processes, blind spot in how to optimize the facility. Kognitwin Unify, which is the foundation of our digital twin, converts unstructured data into knowledge, and then puts that into people’s hands in a very simple but very secure way: via a web-based portal that can be accessed anywhere on any device, and then have the tools built around it to execute the work. 

By making the data discoverable, understandable and available across the organization, our Kognitwin automated a vast amount of pre-planning work and made remote service available so that people were productive during the forced physical lock-out. 

Convergence of OT, IT & ET data. 

Challenge 2. 

Perform production optimization and automation REMOTELY 

To support remote operations the operator wanted to deploy an automated agent instead of a human operator that can manage the setpoints to optimize the oil production while maintaining safe/efficient operating conditions. Kognitwin offered continuous access to crucial information 

The solution to this challenge lay in the use of our Hybrid Machine Learning model deployed in our Kognitwin framework. The reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm (trained by a human) provides a prediction of action in order to optimize the oil production with high degree of accuracy. The algorithm was rewarded for performing a positive action increase or stabiles production within safety limits and penalized for a negative action such a tripping an alarm. 

Our experience in delivering advanced analytic solutions for optimization is that even small improvements to the operating conditions that can be scaled broadly can provide substantial cumulative savings without affecting the production stability. Furthermore, putting a human trained AI in the loop to monitor and slightly adjust low level settings allows operators to work on more productive tasks. 

Kognitwin has been successfully implemented and deployed remotely to operators during Covid-19 within weeks, thus transitioning operators from a reactive to a proactive position so asset managers can handle the coming months with confidence.

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