A CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF DIGITAL TWIN FOR THE OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY

Oil and gas companies hope to use Industrial 4.0 technology to maintain a competitive advantage in the face of a deteriorating structure of hydrocarbon resources, volatile and sharply declining energy prices. The concept of “Oil and Gas 4.0”, based on the approach of Industry 4.0, has been on the agenda of companies for the last 2-3 years. Although Oil and Gas 4.0 is still in its infancy, the technology of digital twin as one of its main technologies has attracted much attention, but there are still some misunderstandings as to how it can be used to create additional benefits in oil and gas operations. A digital twin is a virtual prototype of a real physical object (oil field, well, equipment or infrastructure element), a product or process, the essence of which is to collect digital data and use it to monitor, manage and optimize the physical object. Despite the successful use of digital twin in a number of industries, the oil and gas industry is just beginning to apply this technology, and a number of associated problems are becoming increasingly important. The aim of this work is to analyze the problems of developing digital twin models in the oil and gas industry and to develop a generalized conceptual model for digital twin. The use of digital twin in the oil and gas industry is analyzed in terms of the integration of IT and operational technology. The components of the data management system, virtual object and visualization system, which are part of the proposed digital twin model, are described in detail. Centralized systems are used to manage the data, processes, and models that make up the virtual object. Models are trained through machine learning, and can also use the knowledge of experts and similar digital twins (pp.41-51).