How the industrial metaverse could help plant operators transform maintenance
Summary
- Metaverse-enabled digital twins can help energy, chemicals and industrial plant operators with complex, planned maintenance.
- 3D visualizations of the existing facility can help across various phases of a plant turnaround, the critical process in which units are taken offline for upgrades and other work.
- These immersive technologies can help improve planning, lower costs, prevent delays and reduce risk.
Scheduled maintenance at industrial plants — like those for energy, chemicals and refining — can be complex and costly. This process of taking units offline through turnarounds, or shutdowns and outages, can be critical to ongoing operations and often accounts for a large portion of the maintenance budget. Schedule delays, inaccurate cost estimates and other unexpected issues often lead to millions of dollars in lost revenue and far-reaching supply impacts. To help prevent or mitigate many of these issues, some operators are turning to industrial metaverse-enabled digital twins, an emerging technology that can offer a 3D visualization of an existing plant and potentially transform the overall management and execution of large-scale maintenance efforts.
How can a metaverse-driven digital twin help with turnarounds?
Although this new digital world is far from fully mature, digital twins are already helping operators improve planning, create efficiencies and decrease overall turnaround costs, sometimes by up to 10% according to our estimates. Built from engineering and design models, this immersive technology can offer a detailed view of assets and can be updated with field data and other inputs, so they can stay relevant throughout the life of a plant. A metaverse-driven digital twin may be able to help you achieve these benefits by transforming five key phases of a turnaround.
1. Planning: Prioritize and expedite turnaround preparation
Engineers and maintenance teams can assess asset health easier and evaluate which equipment needs immediate attention and what work can be deferred to the next maintenance cycle. Teams can visualize the equipment layout and find potential issues or process improvements well before the work is performed, while more efficiently planning critical turnaround functions, helping reduce costs and downtime.
2. Procurement: Source and secure resources
Within the digital twin, teams can find the equipment, materials and contractors needed to execute the maintenance quicker, check inventory levels and more efficiently order and track resources through a connected procurement system. Plant operators can make quicker procurement decisions and secure resources ahead of time to help reduce execution risk and save costs.
3. Onboarding: Transform training virtually
Virtual reality (VR), already well-known for offering realistic simulations for equipment maintenance, can be used in a broader capacity to more effectively train contractors and staff on plant layout as well as safety and maintenance procedures — through a 3D visualization of the actual plant. These tools can help reduce training time and costs while helping improve collaboration between contractors and operations teams.
4. Execution: Improve monitoring and tracking
Project leadership can check activities and personnel in real-time using the digital twin to help track the progress of the turnaround and highlight any areas that may require immediate attention. Because much of this is traditionally done manually, plant operators can help reduce the time and resources needed, in many instances leading to a shorter turnaround time and less downtime.
5. Post-turnaround: Capture knowledge and improvements
Post-turnaround documentation can be time-consuming and difficult, potentially introducing significant compliance and liability risks if they are not completed efficiently. The digital twin can reduce these challenges by acting as a single source of truth, capturing lessons learned, detailed records as well as pictures and videos of equipment tagged to the specific assets for future reference.
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Taking immersive technologies even further
The potential applications of the metaverse continues to grow, and it’s picking up speed. In fact, in PwC’s 2022 US Metaverse Survey, two-thirds of company leaders surveyed across industries said they’ve moved beyond experimentation and many expected their metaverse efforts to be fully integrated across the business within a few years. For power and industrial plant operators, possible use cases exist across nearly every aspect of operations. This includes supporting the response to unplanned outages, operational and supply chain improvements, new plant design and asset decommissioning.
As you continue to think about applications throughout your organization, it can be important to continue evaluating potential impacts. For instance, while the metaverse can significantly reduce risk, it may also introduce new risk considerations that should be explored and managed through holistic risk management. It’s important to bring together operations, cybersecurity, information security and other leaders so you can establish guiding principles, governance, controls and other measures necessary to help facilitate the secure and responsible use of the technology. With this, the industrial metaverse has the potential to help drive significant process improvements across the industry.
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