Petrobras innovating with smart twins, industry 6.0

Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras has been on a digital transformation push that includes implementing digital twins technology to digitally replicate all its refineries in order to conduct predictive maintenance and analysis. 

“Now we’re going to a higher stage called smart twins, which is to incorporate artificial intelligence into these processes. We want to increasingly move from a proactive approach to a predictive one,” Petrobras’ digital transformation and innovation director, Nicolas Simone, told BNamericas, adding that the technology has led to US$200mn in savings. 

After the NOC successfully ran an artificial intelligence pilot at one of its digitally replicated refineries, the goal is to gradually roll out smart twins at all refineries through 2022. 

“With digital twins, an engineer takes the parameters developed analogically, puts them into the digital model, simulates them in the digital model and goes back to the analog. With AI, this is done automatically in real-time,” he adds, without revealing the refinery that served as a proof of concept or the vendor developing the AI algorithm.

(Petrobras did not hold a bidding process for the smart twins model and has continued to rely on its existing AI providers. Simone says that it is first necessary to have a viable minimum product before going to the market in a bidding process.)

Supercomputers

Petrobras is also testing these simulation environments with AI on the processing capacity of its two operational supercomputers, Atlas and Fênix, as well as a third one (Dragão) that will go live in the next month or so, says Simone.

Petrobras' target is to reach around 70 petaflops of processing capacity by the end of the year, up from 21 petaflops in 2020, considering both on-premise processing and processing in the cloud.

Petrobras has a multi-cloud strategy that uses AWS, Microsoft and Google.

Industry 6.0

Petrobras is also working internally on industry 6.0, which Simone sees as going beyond automation (industry 4.0) and automation plus AI (5.0) to bring about automation and AI in hostile environments such as the deep sea.

“Operating at a depth of 2,500m isn’t easy. We put a man on the moon, but nobody has stepped on the seabed. The concept we are talking about here is how we can work on advanced robotics, submarine Wi-Fi, bed sensing in the deep,” says Simone.

From a back-office perspective, the company is also carrying out the migration of its management systems to SAP’s S/4 Hana cloud ERP, under one of SAP's largest contracts in Latin America. The goal is to simplify, digitize and integrate processes such as procurement and human resources by 2022.

All of these projects are part of Petrobras' plan to invest US$1.5bn in digital transformation and innovation over the next five years.

Picture source: AFP