National oil and gas companies in the Middle East and Africa region have identified the need for reshaping their business models by instilling digital transformation technologies.
Most of them have even created dedicated leadership roles of digital transformation leaders in their organisations. Many have either charted out a clear vision and road map of digital transformation or they are well on their way to do so.
The oil and gas industry has always led technology adoption when it comes to exploration, drilling, transfer, refining, and delivery among others. However, these are not integrated from end to end and reside in ‘islands’ and within their operational boundaries.
Increasingly, the industry has come to accept that digitial transformation is the means to become more efficient in their operations and thereby sustain profitability.
This translates in to being able to accurately forecase demand, plan production, minimise down time, reduce opex, all without compromising safety. In turn, this involves deployment of predictive analytics, automate work processes and real time information flow to stakeholders within the organisation to enable decision making.
In most oil and gas facilities, a large amount of data from field sensors, diagnostics/analytics platforms, equipment OEM manuals, people’s expertise, lab reports and others exist already. They all play a role in the operational effectiveness of the plant, and they are also interrelated.
In order to perform holistic analysis, taking into consideration the relationship between all the data sources and perform truly "predictive analytics" needs a powerful platform, says Rana Rehman, Business Development Manager Plantweb Applications- MEA, Emerson Automation Solutions.
Apart from the conventional rules based analytics, statistical models built from the knowledge of historical behavior of process and equipment are needed to accurately predict any major event that could impact the plant.
He says this challenge drove the need for a machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) platform for processing this existing pool of data sources in the facility and highlightthe areas of concern in real time along with actionable information in order to prevent or mitigate the impact.
Rehman says Emerson KnowledgeNet (KNet) is an industry-proven platform for processing millions of data measurements such as sensor readings, lab data, simple and complex events.
"It automatically extracts knowledge and predictive models, identifies optimisation opportunities, and behavioural patterns, and also helps operations in focusing on key issues, as well as maximise asset availability and safety."
KNet eliminates the need for gathering, analysing, and reasoning over data and information from control systems, databases, plant applications, and operation procedures. It shortens the decision-making process, which in turn prevents further performance deviation and safety issues while maximising plant efficiency.
The unique features of the KNet platform include:
• It’s one single open platform which includes offline, online data analysis, complex rules, fault propagation, workflows, and analytics models
• It can be deployed on-premises and in the cloud and can connect to several data sources
• It’s not a black box platform and it can import any third-party models or algorithms regardless of the software
• It includes rich smart equipment library and it combines expert knowledge, machine learning and predictive, as well as prescriptive analytics in a single platform
• It automates root cause analysis online for maintenance, process or business issues, and it understands the depth of the operation by linking the reliability, process, energy, quality, environment, safety, and business matters
• It is a domain knowledge out of the box and extensive toolkit of methods for event detection and reasoning, as well as a process equipment library that provides knowledge out of the box and root cause analysis models represented by cause and effect fault trees.
Emerson, headquartered in St Louis, Missouri, US, is a global technology and engineering company, whose automation solutions helps process, hybrid, and discrete manufacturers maximise production, protect personnel and the environment while optimising their energy and operating costs.
Emerson is committed to investing in technologies of the future to ensure the safety and reliability of plants. It is also one of the leading OEMs for software and platforms for the industry, supporting the digitalisation roadmaps of leading oil and gas upstream, midstream, and downstream industries in the Middle East and Africa.
