How Kognitwin enabled O&G customers to maintain stable production during Covid-19
At the start of 2020, it would have been difficult to believe that Energy operators could maintain production continuity and work within safety constraints under the following conditions imposed by 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 adopteda 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 wereable to:
maintain stable production, in some cases even increaseproduction
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
Digital Twin
Kongsberg’sdigital twin technology, Kognitwin, is a solution that provides a virtual overview of your asset and its behaviour. By unifying your data and surfacing it in a simple and intuitive workflow your workers have an up-to-date view of the asset condition that can be dynamically interacted with from anywhere in the world.
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 businesscontinuity, collaboration and decision-making speed while teamswork 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 thenputs 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 Kognitwinautomated a vast amount of pre-planning work and made remote service available so that people were productive during the forced physical lock-out.
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 managethe setpoints to optimize the oil production while maintaining safe/efficient operating conditions.Kognitwinoffered continuous access to crucial information
The solution to this challenge lay in the use of ourHybrid Machine Learning model deployed in ourKognitwin 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 AIin 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.
With 200 years of determination, KONGSBERG has a long and proud history. Through our foresight and ability to adapt, we have survived through changing times, always boosting innovation and pushing new technologies to better serve the market.