Diagnosing emerging issues before they become a problem is the main goal of a robust data analytics and remote M&D program. A data driven approach to managing asset health and performance is a proven way to improve return on asset investment. Financial project drivers include the following.

• Prevent unplanned shutdowns. Gain valuable insight into performance, process, and condition anomalies in near-real-time to detect, mitigate, and prevent equipment problems well before they impact plant operations.

• Improve operational efficiency. Identify and quantify performance deviations when they first emerge. Gain infrastructure-wide awareness into equipment and process health, increasing your ability to improve equipment and fleet-level operations.

• Prioritize maintenance by condition. Assess, quantify, and triage your maintenance activities by economic impact. Apply condition-based techniques to bolster your current scheduled maintenance and long-term maintenance planning programs.

• Simplify issue resolution. Identify, assess, and resolve critical issues in priority order to keep your plant running at peak efficiency and track them in your CMMS system.

• Maintain operational knowledge. Make full use of existing historical and operational knowledge. Information is stored for future reference to inform better decision-making and drive advance pattern recognition.

Black & Veatch provides its Remote Monitoring & Diagnostics service from four global centers with engineering domain expertise to help clients balance the cost and benefit of maintenance activities, to make sure they are spending their time and money in the right place. Then we employ virtual issue notification, blogging and work ticketing to enable fast O&M response locally or globally.

Black & Veatch also provides a service to help clients select, deploy, and configure remote monitoring data analytics software including change management, training, and support.

Reliability and risk analyses harness data analytics to explore strategies to achieve reliability and performance metrics across many industries.

Black & Veatch developed its own Monte Carlo RAM software, which is flexible and enables modeling of complex systems in order to forecast long-term performance and reliability. Black & Veatch Reliability Specialists help you maximize data value by taking advantage of the model’s ability to explore and improve reliability and generating results that lead to increased understanding and to actionable decisions.

We leverage RAM Analysis to forecast future system production based on the design equipment and provides quantitative results to balance reliability and cost. Areas for reliability improvement are emphasized through evaluation of equipment size, redundancy, arrangement and maintenance schedules. For existing facilities, it enables benchmarking and insight to remain competitive. This powerful tool brings together data, increases transparency, and helps stakeholders understand the value and implications of reliability. Through simulation, Monte Carlo RAM modeling generates distributions such as equivalent availability factor (EAF), mean time between failures (MTBF) or the availability costs. RAM modeling allows for sensitivity simulation to show how different design decisions or mitigation plans affect key performance indicators such as reliability, availability, maintainability, and cost.

Failure Modes and Effects Criticality Analysis (FMECA) provides a qualitative assessment of risk, based on different failure modes. Our experts leverage FMECA is to identify all modes of failure within a system/plant design and identify all critical failure possibilities for elimination, mitigation, or acceptance.

The Fuels team at Black & Veatch specializes in decarbonization and environmental excellence as well as reliability studies. Primary studies include coal to biomass and coal to gas conversions, fuel quality impact analyses, waste to energy studies, and heat rate/efficiency improvement studies. Analyze impacts of various fuels on the combustion process including biofuels and hydrogen. Using the EPRI Vista fuels modeling software, our engineers help clients understand the implications of switching fuels, co-firing, and test burns before committing to expensive fuel changes. The solution is driven by the EPRI Vista software and Black & Veatch engineers with decades of experience quantifying fuel impacts on efficiency, reliability, and output.

Black & Veatch deploys Twinify digital twins to provide insight into how assets and systems are performing relative to plans and expectations. The digital twins are also able to provide projections about how assets will perform in the future under different conditions based on current insights and considering multiple time horizons.

The digital twins are tailored to our client’s specific assets, systems, and KPIs while leveraging Black & Veatch methods and expertise. The four focus areas are as follows.

• Performance – Production, Efficiency, Consumables,

• Reliabilty – Asset Health, Uptime, Risk

• Sustainability – Compliance, ESGs, Technology Choice

• Financial – Agility, Finance-ability, Costs

The digital twins from Twinify support decision-making across time horizons:

Short-Term Tactical

• Score and track

• Actual vs. planned

• Drilldown insights

• Forecast near-term

• Envision impacts (actions, externalities)

Medium-Term Operational

• Assess risks

• Simulate impacts

• Compare alternative plans/actions

• Map uncertainties and sensitivities

• Optimize resources

Longer-Term Strategic

• Plan portfolios, technologies, policies

• Compare options

• Evaluate impacts

• Map uncertainties and sensitivities

• Twinify

• Prometheus APM

• IBM Maximo Application Suite

• Microsoft PowerBI

• Tableau