Months after announcing their partnership Siemens and Bentley Systems have introduced PlantSight, a digital solution aimed at increasing efficiency in plant operations. PlantSight enables as-operated and up-to-date digital twins which synchronize with both physical reality and engineering data, creating a holistic digital context for consistently understood digital components across disparate data sources, for any operating plant.
PlantSight feteches data from multiple 3D models including reality meshes in one portal view, allowing rapid access to information that has previously been inaccessible. Every real-world operating plant is characterized by cumulative evolution, both to its brownfield physical condition and to the varied types and formats of theoretically corresponding engineering data. Accordingly, as-operated digital twins must reliably synchronize reflections of both the physical reality and its virtual engineering representations, comprehensively and accurately. Moreover, further frequent changes are inevitable. With PlantSight, every process plant owner-operator can realize the benefits of as-operated digital twins – without disruption to their existing physical or virtual environment.
The company said that for process industries, characterized by ongoing capital projects, the effectiveness of digital twins depends upon the integrity and accessibility of as-operated information presented and continuously updated in trusted 2D schematic and 3D model formats. PlantSight provides all stakeholders with cloud/web-enabled visibility and access into existing data and tool interfaces, assuring that changes are timely and accurately captured and managed.
With PlantSight as-operated digital twin cloud services, operational and project-related engineering data is aligned seamlessly. All disciplines and stakeholders have immediate access to consistent representations. Especially for brownfield installations, the time and effort to federate and complete asset information will be significantly reduced, with plant documentation kept up to date, and its quality accordingly improved.
“From the start of Bentley Systems’ strategic alliance with Siemens, we have together seen our development of PlantSight as having perhaps the most significance for our marketplace. Siemens’ announced a combination of its digital offerings for discrete and process plants enables our bringing together, through a cloud service, the complementary elements of COMOS, OpenPlant, MindSphere, and Teamcenter. PlantSight can now realize the process industries’ top priority in ‘going digital’— the digital twin enablement of their operating plant engineering,” said Greg Bentley, CEO for Bentley Systems.
“With PlantSight, we’re stepping up our cooperation with Bentley and extending the possibilities offered by data utilization for the process industry. This joint solution based on the complementary know-how of Bentley and Siemens represents a key step towards making digital twins even more efficient and creating a digitally integrated value chain, which offers even greater consistency. In this way, we’re continuously enlarging our Digital Enterprise portfolio by embracing future technologies,” said Klaus Helmrich, Member of the Management Board of Siemens AG.
Valentijn de Leeuw, Vice President ARC Advisory Group, said, “I believe that Siemens’ and Bentley’s newly-developed PlantSight services will establish a foundation for next-generation asset information and performance management. For as-operated digital twins, this augments the actual plant by integrating operational data with operational intelligence dashboards, immersive operator training simulation, and links with applications such as process simulation, asset strategy, and reliability. The benefits of the environment will increase with the number of microservices provided.”
