Building blocks for the future – the digital twin ecosystem

In his second blog looking at how the energy sector integrated digital across operations, FutureOn’s Senior Vice President of Products, Jostein Lien, examines the importance of digital ecosystems. 

Real-life applications of digital twin technologies take a variety of shapes, depending on factors including requirements in the field, company outlook, and traditional approached to data. 

For one super major, the solutions from FutureOn are part of a bigger picture approach to the next generation of development in which FieldTwin represents “a fundamental cog in building a digital twin ecosystem for subsea”. 

This approach is already being used for field design including flowline routings etc, and will ultimately be embedded through the lifecycle of subsea projects across the company – value that will only grow with increasing maturity. 

It will in time extend from planning through decommissioning, and from onshore projects through deepwater deployment and into refineries as well as new energy and renewables. 

Integration with existing systems, including GIS data platforms, is central to success: the higher the quality of the data, the more up to date, the greater the value of the resulting digital twin. 

For the super, there were five main requirements for the digital twin link between an in-house, primarily 2D geo-spatial package and FieldTwin. These covered display of bathymetry, existing infrastructure and map services data such as licence boundaries and field locations. It also included reverse functionality: display within in-house systems of FieldTwin data on subsea layouts and associated metadata. 

APIs provided the architecture necessary to achieve the desired level of integration. On map services, “we were incredibly surprised at how quickly and easily we were able to access this information in our application, it has been a real positive success story”, said the customer.