Woodside Energy has stood up a data fabric to streamline the collection and transmission of data from its assets and sites into a digital twin used for situational awareness and predictive maintenance.

The liquefied natural gas (LNG) producer wanted to reduce the number of hops between data-generating assets and a central enterprise data warehouse or data lake that underpins the digital twin, which is called Fuse.

The company collects alarm and event data that records state changes in equipment, such as valve opening or closing or a piece of equipment exceeding a threshold, and time series data on variables such as temperature, pressure and flow rate, a measure of the production capacity of a site.

This data previously had a convoluted pathway from the OT systems and sensors that collected it, into IT and onward into Fuse.

Versent lead engineer Quentin White, who worked on the project alongside AWS and Woodside, described the “ incumbent method of getting that data from site” in a presentation at AWS Summit Sydney.

“The control systems collected the data at-site; it was synced to a local historian, and then synced into an enterprise historian in the data domain,” he said.

Data historians are a traditional repository run at industrial sites to collect data from specialised OT systems.

“[The data] then goes through a number of other ingestion hops before it reaches the enterprise data warehouse or the time series data lake,” White said.

“At every one of those hops, you’re introducing latency.”

This led to delayed situational awareness for plant operators, who could see a change in a control system but not have it reflected on a Fuse dashboard for up to 30 minutes, which delayed, at times, critical decision-making.

“We wanted to make it easy for business users to be able to find that data and not have to go through a data-hunting exercise, particularly when it’s an unplanned plant event, and that’s where that time is critical,” White said.

The response is the creation of an industrial data fabric to improve data collection and ingestion into Fuse, from where it can be consumed by asset and plant operators and other business units.

The concept for WINDFALL – Woodside INdustrial Data Fabric At Low Latency – is attributed to principal architect Simon Chalmers, who White said was “driven by a staunch belief that acquiring low-latency, high-frequency plant data at scale and bringing that to the corporate environment would be an enabler of business value.”

It is built largely on AWS managed services, mainly AWS IoT SiteWise and IoT Greengrass.

In designing hops and latency out of the data collection and transmission process, the project team effectively reverse-engineered the paths that data travelled between Fuse and the sites.

Data is collected as close to the asset as possible, and transmitted to a central AWS store “as quickly as possible”.

White noted the reduction of steps in the path enabled Woodside to increase the frequency with which it polled the source for data.

Woodside’s head of digital products and delivery Josianne Fortin said the LNG producer had realised benefits around cost, delivery velocity and risk reduction through the use of WINDFALL.

“When you operate in a big environment like Woodside, cost reduction is always really critical,” she said.

“By moving from what used to be very custom development and custom application [oriented approach] to managed services, working with the AWS product services team and Versent, really allowed us to minimise our development costs, but more than costs, it also increased our delivery velocity.

“As an oil and gas company, our licence to operate, risk reduction and safety is [also] always front of mind. 

“By being able to give near real-time data to our operator and operating asset, we start to provide situational awareness on the asset, which reduces our risk on the asset.”

Fortin said that the use of WINDFALL continues to be expanded with additional use cases and users.

The amount of data it handles is also set to increase as Woodside brings new capabilities online, such as its Scarborough energy project in Western Australia in 2026, its Trion project off Mexico, and its recently approved Louisiana LNG project in the United States.

“What we are really keen on doing is working alongside these operating assets,” Fortin said.

The company also intends to keep an eye on how other customers are using AWS services in industrial settings, she added.

Ry Crozier attended AWS Summit in Sydney as a guest of AWS.