Keeping the digital twin up-to-date — Process monitoring to identify changes in a plant

As more and more information is available in all stages of plant engineering, the efficiency and quality of the overall engineering process is improved. This enables new chances for further improvements as well. For example, usage data and events detected during operation of the plant can be fed back to the models used for engineering. This allows future plants to be engineered more efficiently. Furthermore it allows to use these models with up-to-date data to prepare maintenance procedures or to simulate the effects of plant reconfigurations before they are applied. This contribution deals with the architecture required to transfer data from plant operation to the engineering models. We base our approach on the efforts made for virtual commissioning and approval tests. We especially describe a method to extract changes to the process.