Simulations can add value across the lifecycle of a manufacturing or production process—from the upfront design work for the capital project portion of the lifecycle to the ongoing operations and maintenance.
In a Processing magazine article, Using Life Cycle Dynamic Simulation to Drive Projects And Performance, Emerson’s Sean Sullivan teamed with a third-party consultant working at chemical manufacturing facility to write the article.
They open defining lifecycle dynamic simulation as:
…holistic, scalable simulation throughout the plant life cycle that can help chemical organizations make strategic project and operations decisions that drive toward top-quartile performance without sacrificing safety or uptime.
They also define a Digital Twin as:
…an operations reference system hosted in a private cloud environment or maintained locally on virtual servers…
This operations reference system simulates the control system and a dynamic simulation provides a virtual representation of the running process and its associated dynamics. These create virtual plant models that simulate the automation and plant technologies used in the physical world. Used together:
