Industrial Assets and Public Infrastructure share several challenges in their decision-making processes, being the most visible complexity. For a decision to be called “right” or, at least “plausible”, several dimensions of analysis like sizing, design, operability, maintainability, safety, reliability, cost-effectiveness, emissions, or regulatory compliance, need to be jointly assessed across the entire (or the remaining) life cycle of the Asset at hand. Each one of these dimensions can prove a certain alternative immediately wrong (as in the case of a violation of safety or certain mandatory regulation), but none of them can prove it immediately right, so trade-off analyses are always part of the decision-making process. The individual complexity of each one of these analysis layers increases with the number of interconnected elements, or the variability, randomness, or uncertainty of both, the elements composing the asset, and their operational context. A manager in this context, armed only with his expertise, and perhaps some meeting rooms, is at a very high risk of not being able to discover the proper alternative before the time or the resources to take that decision are exhausted.
As a way to address these decision-making challenges, this paper summarizes a methodology developed by Us at Knar, where simulation models are specified and developed in a specific way that allows them to cooperate in the agile production of forecasts to inform decisions related to industrial assets. The mentioned simulation models are centered around the idea of business-value and its connection to the physical assets and because of that, are termed “Digital Assets”. The paper provides an example of how this method called “Digital Assets Truly Managing Physical Assets”, and associated tools have been used to guide improvement initiatives on Gas Production Systems and Power Generation Systems.
Speaker Biography
Jorge Granada is an Electronic Engineer, and the founder and technical lead for Knar Global LLC. Mr. Granada has extensive experience of more than 20 years applying modeling and simulation with the purpose of improving business performance for Oil & Gas Companies, Mining, Power, Water, Manufacturing, and Defense. Some of his clients have been National Oil and Gas and Major Companies (Shell, Ecopetrol, Petrobras, Pluspetrol, Tenaris, among others). Mr. Granada has worked on more than 150 projects in asset optimization industrial and his focus areas are affordability strategies, modeling and simulation of reliability, technological negotiation, and entrepreneurship as a way for the improvement of the standard of living of society.