According to a recent release, Baker Hughes (News - Alert), a GE company, and KBC, a subsidiary of Yokogawa Electric Corporation, have entered into a preferred partnership that will provide a combination of process simulation, asset performance management and operational software solutions to the oil and gas industry.
Leveraging GE Predix, the company’s Industrial IoT platform, the partnership extends KBC’s Petro-SIM process simulation modeling further into the oil and gas value chain, and provides connectivity between operations, assets, people and business processes for end-to-end optimization.
Now, customers will be able to reduce bottlenecks in facilities, processes and equipment to achieve optimal production and lower risk, the companies said.
“This partnership showcases our commitment to break down data ‘silos’ and is an ideal example of the convergence of process and operational thinking,” said Matthias Heilmann, Chief Digital Officer, BHGE. “For the first time, oil and gas customers can build a digital twin of a plant, refinery or rig that incorporates end-to-end process and operational analytics and machine learning. With Petro-SIM providing simulation technology to our fullstream portfolio, this best-in-class solution will bring us into a new era of operational improvement.”
The Petro-SIM simulation technology already connects to cloud-based IIoT data-as-a-service solutions to remotely monitor and help improve customers' process operations. The KBC technology offers a central repository for process topology and stream and equipment data with access to live and historical plant operating data for performance monitoring. Asset Performance Management (APM (News - Alert)) from GE enables intelligent asset strategies to help optimize performance to make operations safer by helping to predict and prevent failures.
“This game-changing combination of KBC and BHGE will result in solutions for customers to quickly analyze problems and opportunities, and create insights that can then be turned into actions that will assure operational excellence, and sustainability, based on the Yokogawa approach of engaging in co-innovation with customers,” said Andy Howell, CEO, KBC. “Together we will deliver molecularly-enabled digital twins of assets across the fullstream from wellbore through pipeline networks, topsides, gas plants, refineries and petro-chemical plants.”