A Digital Twin Approach to the Integrity Management of Production Assets

This paper presents an approach for specifying integrity management-oriented digital twins, together with the information technology system capable of creating and operating them along the asset life cycle. A modular functional architecture is presented, based on the recommendations of DNV-RP-A204 and relevant topics are addressed, such as input data frequency, conditioning and quality, envelope monitoring, descriptive and predictive analyses, human-machine interface and warnings. A real-world example, based on the authors’ experience in developing DT-based integrity management systems for the oil and gas sector, is used to illustrate the application of the concepts and to discuss the possibility of extending the proposed approach to other kinds of production equipment and structures.