Siemens and Bentley Systems have announced the introduction of PlantSight, based on their highly complementary software portfolios. PlantSight is a digital twinning solution that will benefit customers by enabling more efficient plant operations.
Digital twinning is a key part of the evolution of Industry 4.0, which aims to connect the physical world with the digital. It refers to the mapping of a physical asset to a digital one to enable real-time monitoring of the asset’s efficiency and condition. According to Orbis Research, up to 80% of IoT platforms will contain some form of digital twinning technology by 2020.
PlantSight enables as-operated and up-to-date digital twins which synchronise with both physical reality and engineering data, creating a holistic digital context for consistently understood digital components across disparate data sources, for any operating plant. Plant operators benefit from high trustworthiness and quality of information for continuous operational readiness and more reliability.
Every real-world operating plant is characterised by cumulative evolution, both to its brownfield physical condition and to the varied types and formats of theoretically corresponding engineering data. Accordingly, as-operated digital twins must reliably synchronise reflections of both the physical reality and its virtual engineering representations, comprehensively and accurately. Moreover, further frequent changes are inevitable. With PlantSight, according to the companies, every process plant owner-operator can realise the benefits of as-operated digital twins – without disruption to their existing physical or virtual environment.
For process industries, characterised by ongoing capital projects, the effectiveness of digital twins depends upon the integrity and accessibility of as-operated information presented and continuously updated in trusted 2D schematic and 3D model formats. PlantSight provides all stakeholders with cloud/web-enabled visibility and access into existing data and tool interfaces, assuring that changes are timely and accurately captured and managed.
Greg Bentley, CEO for Bentley Systems, said, “From the start of Bentley Systems’ strategic alliance with Siemens, we have together seen our development of PlantSight as having perhaps the most significance for our marketplace. Siemens’ announced combination of its digital offerings for discrete and process plants enables our bringing together, through a cloud service, the complementary elements of COMOS, OpenPlant, MindSphere, and Teamcenter. PlantSight can now realize the process industries’ top priority in ‘going digital’— the digital twin enablement of their operating plant engineering!”
“With PlantSight, we’re stepping up our cooperation with Bentley and extending the possibilities offered by data utilisation for the process industry. This joint solution based on the complementary know-how of Bentley and Siemens represents a key step towards making digital twins even more efficient and creating a digitally integrated value chain, which offers even greater consistency. In this way, we’re continuously enlarging our Digital Enterprise portfolio by embracing future technologies,” said Klaus Helmrich, Member of the Management Board of Siemens AG.
Valentijn de Leeuw, Vice President ARC Advisory Group, said, “I believe that Siemens’ and Bentley’s newly-developed PlantSight services will establish a foundation for next-generation asset information and performance management. For as-operated digital twins, this augments the actual plant by integrating operational data with operational intelligence dashboards, immersive operator training simulation, and links with applications such as process simulation, asset strategy, and reliability. The benefits of the environment will increase with the number of microservices provided.”