Asset Digital Twins Integrating Process Safety

All operators of offshore facilities aim to provide a safe workplace for their staff. However, in the case of process safety hazards, there will always be some residual potential for high consequence accidents. Making these risks ‘visible’ in both design and operations is an important part of risk management.

The industry has developed many techniques for driving process safety hazards to the forefront. Many are qualitative or semi-quantitative and have considerable power in the hands of those with the correct experience. Fully quantitative risk analysis (QRA) is also used but, in the past, has mostly been the domain of technical safety experts and buried in large documents with immense amounts of detail. This inhibits the use of these assessments in design and operational decision processes, as key data may not be available in a timely manner.

The terms ‘digitalization’ and ‘digital twin’ are used frequently without any clear explanation of what they mean. In the case of QRA, the data has been digital for decades, there is nothing new in the use of digital computers to arrive at the answers.

What is new is the way the development of cloud-based information systems has transformed the delivery and use of data by organizations. A detailed QRA contains risk data that is tagged by both physical location and process system and considers many of the barriers that are used to control and mitigate process risks. This paper explores how cloud-based systems can revolutionize how risk data can be delivered interactively in text, 2D and 3D formats, reflect changes in operating conditions and reach a wider audience. Sensitivities can be quickly rerun for use in decision-making required by the stakeholders. Having this information readily available also opens a path towards integration with asset digital twins, providing a wider information and knowledge source for any asset.