Digitalization brings tremendous opportunities to all industries. Digitalization is based on optimally prepared data – and that’s precisely what makes modernizing and maintaining process plants so challenging. In the case of brownfield planning, the existing building structure typically isn’t recorded in a digital form. As a result, detailed planning requires tremendous effort and is extremely costly. The differences between as-designed and as-built make projects even more difficult to calculate, and these differences must be extensively recorded and identified from the ground up. Often, changes made over the course of years aren’t transferred to the plant documentation, or else they’re transferred inconsistently or only in parts.
Relics of an analog age
Long plant lifecycles mean that a large amount of plant data still isn’t available in electronic form, making a digital assignment to field devices difficult or even impossible. In addition, data often remains with the EPC, which means that plant operators lose their data integrity and data sovereignty. Another challenge is to safeguard and transfer expertise, because long-time employees leave the company and their knowledge isn’t documented. The digitalization of data is therefore essential for remaining competitive in the future.
Making brownfield plants digitalization-ready
The integrated software COMOS for comprehensive plant management offers custom solutions for brownfield enablement. With COMOS, data from a variety of sources can be centrally managed to improve maintenance planning and accelerate recommissioning.Using a central data platform, COMOS ensures consistent information and a seamless flow of all project-related data over the entire plant lifecycle. The COMOS solution for brownfield enablement allows you to quickly record, organize, link, and visualize large volumes of data and documents. The object-oriented data model and open system architecture make it possible to easily import data and documents (1D/2D/3D) from the engineering and operating phases to the plant lifecycle management system at any time.
Smart underlying data for digitalization
Smart underlying data can be created from all types of documents, including image files and PDFs. For example, innovative techniques can be used to record and digitalize an up-to-date image of the plant based on drone images or laser scans. The digitalized data lay the groundwork for the digital twin of the brownfield plant. The digital twin is a solid basis for devising measures to increase plant efficiency and makes the conversion or expansion of existing plant sections much easier.
COMOS improves overall process safety management thanks to increased transparency and reliable engineering data. The system immediately indicates inconsistent data and compares the plant’s “as-designed” state with its “as-built” state. Data can be consolidated at any time. Shorter search times and greater data consistency result in a substantial reduction in operating costs.
Your benefits at a glance
New perspectives for plant design and operation
Bentley Systems and Siemens have established an alliance for advancing digital change. The goal is to start ushering process plants into the digital future right now by means of systematic plant optimization that uses existing data from across the entire lifecycle to increase value.Start taking advantage of synergies today with COMOS as a central platform for data management in engineering and operation and with individual solutions from Bentley Systems. Together, these solutions enable plant, maintenance, and engineering data to be planned and managed more consistently. The contextualization of previously unused inventory data plays a key role. It frequently creates brand-new potential and is therefore essential for brownfield projects. In the future, Siemens and Bentley Systems will introduce more solutions for supplying even more consistent data – including across system boundaries. This means that the commercial value of brownfield process plants can be increased by validating various data repositories from different applications and linking them together. In the future, this will allow operators, plant owners, and service companies to optimize production and realize profits. In addition, it will be possible to make complex business decisions much more quickly and reliably.
