Asset performance management and digital twins

Keeping the plant running, with a digital copy of every asset

A refinery, an oil platform, a power plant or a wind farm costs a very large sum to build. It earns money only while it runs. When it stops without warning, the owner loses money every hour. For an oil platform, that can be millions a day. So energy companies spend heavily on keeping their plants running. The industry calls a plant or a large machine an asset.

Three ways to maintain a machine

Fix it when it breaks

This is the simplest way, and the most costly, because the plant stops without warning.

Service it on a schedule

for example every six months. This is safer, but it replaces parts that are still good.

Watch it and act in time

Sensors measure vibration, temperature and pressure all the time. Software looks for the early signs of a fault, and the repair is planned before the machine fails. This is called predictive maintenance.

Three ways to maintain a machine: fix it when it breaks, service it on a schedule, or watch it with sensors and plan the repair before it fails, which is predictive maintenance.

The digital twin. A digital twin is a digital copy of a real plant, kept up to date by live data from the plant's sensors. Engineers use it in three ways:

to see the state of every part of the plant from one screen
to test a change on the twin before making it in the real plant
to train operators on a simulator, the way pilots train before they fly

The digital twin: a digital copy of a real plant, kept up to date by live data from its sensors, which engineers use to see every part of the plant, test a change before making it, and train operators.

Who builds it, who buys it. The buyers are the companies that own and run energy plants: oil and gas producers, power producers and owners of wind and solar farms. Two kinds of companies sell to them. Equipment makers sell monitoring software along with their machines. Specialist software companies sell digital twins and inspection tools. Several of both build their software in India.

The same software is used in factories of every kind. (More on it in Market Segment 37.4, Predictive maintenance and industrial IoT platforms, in Industry Vertical 37, Manufacturing tech.)

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

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Monitoring, digital twins and inspection

Monitoring, digital twins and inspection

Monitoring the machines

Baker Hughes

with engineers in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Pune, is an oilfield-services and energy-technology company. An oilfield-services company supplies equipment and services to oil and gas producers. Baker Hughes makes turbines and compressors, and the software that monitors them. It has the most job postings in this Market Segment.

Digital twins

Kongsberg Digital

a Norwegian company with engineers in Bengaluru, builds digital twins of oil platforms and plants. It also builds the simulators on which their operators train.

Inspection

SkySpecs

with engineers in Hyderabad, inspects the blades of wind turbines with drones. It also manages their repair.

One company here works at the start of a plant's life instead

OpenSolar

with engineers in Bengaluru, gives solar installers free software for designing rooftop solar systems.

One company covered mainly in another Market Segment also works here:

Hexagon R&D India

with engineers in Hyderabad and Pune, builds software for designing plants and managing assets. (More on it in Market Segment 37.2, CAD and PLM software, in Industry Vertical 37, Manufacturing tech.)

AVEVA, which also sells software for plants, is covered elsewhere. (More on it in Market Segment 37.1, Industrial automation and control software, in Industry Vertical 37, Manufacturing tech.) SLB, Halliburton and the large oil and gas companies run their own engineering centres in India. (More on them in the GCC collection.)

The twin that runs the plant.

Digital twins began as 3D drawings of a plant. Fed by live data and by AI models, they now predict how a plant will behave, and recommend how to run it. The oil and gas industry was the first to trust them, because a stopped platform costs millions a day. Wind and solar companies are following.

That is the software that keeps energy plants running: sensors and software that warn of a fault, and a digital twin that shows the whole plant. It began in oil and gas, and wind and solar now use it too.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What energy and climate tech companies hire for.

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