The definition of Digital Twin is generally associated with process control, in environments such as power plants, manufacturing plants, refineries, and other industrial places where there is the need for monitoring remotely in real time the status of equipment and instrumentation. The biggest downside of such digital twins is that they can be extremely expensive and difficult to keep up-to-date due to the complexity of their real counterpart.
However, a digital twin of a drilling rig can be easily kept under control by overriding the cost issues. This gives the opportunity to drastically enhance the rig safety and reliability, allowing better planning and design, improved training methodologies, costs reduction and best-in-class safety standards.
In this paper we present a novel approach to digital replicas for the Oil & Gas industry: a physical-digital replica of a drilling rig. Although the idea is not at all new - simulators have been in use in the aerospace industry since many decades, it is quite new in the oil and gas industry, especially from the competence, training, and human factors perspective.
The Oil & Gas industry is rapidly evolving toward extreme digitalization, drilling rigs are getting more complex and computerized. However, even highly automated rigs need to be manned, therefore, it is extremely important that operators perfectly know the actual equipment they will be using, in order to ensure safe and cost-efficient operations.
The study found that the use of digital twins for the training of drilling operators raises competence and confidence with the equipment, allowing them to familiarize with the rig and gain information on its main elements, to perceive the underlying mechanics involved and allow the realization of several attempts, if necessary, to perform tasks without the cost associated with errors in a real situation.
