Creation of a New Offering: Digital Twin as a Service

Plants in the process industry have long-lasting lifecycles of several decades. These long operation phases can only be achieved when these assets undergo continuous maintenance and repair activities. Further, the modernization of plants becomes necessary over time. Therefore the as-is state of the specific brownfield plant needs to be digitized. While the capturing can be automated by laser scanning technology, remodeling is still a manual task. In addition, virtual representation and keeping it up-to-date becomes a demand in the process industry. Based on customer demands, new offerings for the generation of a digital twin of a process plant have been shaped. Input for the offerings are point clouds as a result of laser scans of the specific asset. Depending on the size or complexity of these, the data volume increases drastically and decreases the manageability within CAD or authoring systems respectively. The offer of reduced point clouds addresses this use case. By reducing the number of points the data volume is reduced as well, which leads to better performance within the mentioned systems. In addition, nowadays CAD systems do not provide filtering according to point clouds. The basic segmentation comprises recognized objects in the categories pipeline, equipment as well as structure and provides these as single point clouds. All together represent the entire scan, while the various categories/point clouds can be made visible or invisible. An intelligent filtering can be applied this way. This can also be achieved on component level. The recognized objects are categorized as pipe, elbow, tee, reducer, valve, or flange and are provided as single point clouds as well (Segmentation Plus). By clustering the points that describe one pipeline component, the structure can be broken down on component level. Geometrical as well as spatial information can be derived. Based on that information, CAD models can be generated (CAD Basic). These models can be provided in the native format of specific CAD systems or neutral formats like step or IFC with regards to BIM.