Abstract / Description
Digital twins are necessary for the successful digitalization of oil and gas field operations. Unfortunately, they are poorly understood and hyped. This project will provide a much-needed research agenda to (1) work with existing industry initiatives in digital twins for field management so as to (2) develop the methods needed to create a next generation of scalable, maintainable and useful digital twins. PeTWIN links researchers from University of Oslo and Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul with digital twin initiatives in Equinor and the Libra Joint Venture in Brazil. The researchers will work with each company to identify problems in building and running digital twins. We then build a research-based methodology and best practice by applying knowledge representation and semantically enabled data analytics. We will build shared conceptual models of the field management domain and the lifecycle of information in the digital twin. These will support current and future petrotechnical applications and allow better governance of data in the digital twins. They also improve data access, support smarter analytical methods and enable new, digital workflows. This use of shared models is the main novelty of this work. We will then prototype pre-commercial tools and software needed to demonstrate these methods. We will also interact with relevant standards organisations (eg ENERGISTICS). Validation will be done through demonstration on diverse use cases provided by Equinor and Libra. This knowledge-building project will be run as a single Norwegian-Brazilian project and devotes substantial resources to knowledge building and dissemination. Each stipend holder will have a long-term visit to the other university and partner companies. Use will be made of internships and master’s exchanges. A Norway-Brazil forum will be held each year to share experience and the results of this work will be summarised in a much-needed monograph.