Australia’s entire resources sector relies upon automated processes controlled by a wide-variety of hardware and software tools, many of which are legacy solutions. New digital technologies offer tremendous opportunities to increase the productivity, reliability and security of these processes particularly in the technically demanding LNG and hydrogen export sectors.
However, these digital technologies are typically not interoperable: products from one vendor cannot communicate or work with products from another. This constraint applies to interactions between new and legacy digital systems, as well as between modern Industry 4.0 technologies.
This program will work to develop the industry-wide standards necessary to ensure new digital technologies for use in both LNG and hydrogen export are interoperable and provide a platform for demonstrating that interoperability. In parallel, emerging Industry 4.0 technologies for advanced process automation and control (e.g. digital twins, predictive maintenance sensing) will be benchmarked rigorously to demonstrate their fidelity and value.
The successful deployment of interoperable Industry 4.0 technologies in LNG and hydrogen export plants will enable:
- increased throughput and energy efficiency through the improved understanding of the process delivered via advanced digital sensors and models, and
- reduced maintenance and inventory costs through the ability to reliably predict equipment failure rates and thereby avoid excessive expenditure on contingent spares.
Where possible, the program will leverage published standards and specifications, such as the Open Industrial Interoperability Ecosystem (OIIE) specification published by MIMOSA as part of ISO/TS 18101-1:2019, for achieving standards-based interoperable digital ecosystem.
The program will also leverage facilities available at the UWA Industry 4.0 Testlab for Energy & Resources Digital Interoperability, the Australian OIIE™ Interoperability Laboratory at UniSA, the CISCO Innovation Central Centre at Curtin, the ACEPT Facility at South Metropolitan TAFE and other data streams made available by industry partners.
FEnEx CRC Commonwealth Milestones for Program 3
20.RP3.0048 Open specification for analytics interoperability
22.RP3.0120 Requirements, specifications and piloting of interoperable ecosystem cluster management