Utilities

Utility companies tend to have a large number of facilities, often remote. Creating digital twins of those facilities delivers value on a number of levels.

Improved maintenance: A well implemented digital twin program can reduce maintenance costs overall by 20% on average. Well implemented means the following:

• An accurate catalog of what is at the remote facilities. This is often surprisingly difficult to obtain from current systems. Taking the time to document the assets at the facility and keep that catalog accurate will pay dividends. We can update twins based on simple photographs taken by maintenance crew and use AI to automatically recognize equipment.

• Connect the twin to all available systems such as document management, asset management and maintenance. This information can then be associated with the twin  so clicking on, say, a pump, will pull up the documents, asset and maintenance records associated with that pump. This information can also be retrieved through a generative AI chatbot allowing queries like ‘pull documents and maintenance records for pump 7’ to give a text answer but also to highlight the pump in question on the digital twin.

• Connect to all available SCADA / IoT systems. Complex facilities often have multiple SCADA systems and centralizing all that data into a single user interface (the twin) is a major step in the right direction. This data will also be queried through generative AI.

With these steps maintenance staff can arrive knowing what they are facing, with the right spare parts and can retrieve information in the field through a tablet or laptop to further improve their efficiency.

Simulation: Utility systems are complex and will behave in certain ways under, for example, increased water flow. UrsaLeo’s Gemini platform supports a range of simulation packages including fluid dynamics, physics based simulation and even robots and automated pallets. All of these can be used to plan facilities and stress test facilities. Knowing how they will behave accurate under a range of different conditions will allow more efficient planning and avert disaster conditions arising.

Training and informational videos: Inevitably training needs to occur and it can be done remotely using the twin and a suitable learning management system (LMS). There is also often a public facing side to utility installations where it’s important to have accurate visually attractive videos to show. These can be created directly from the twin giving photorealistic results at a fraction of the price of other video creation methods.