Situation Awareness Explainer

Enhancing Situation Awareness with Digital Twins

In today's complex industrial environments, maintaining high levels of situation awareness is crucial for effective decision-making and operational safety. Digital twins offer a powerful solution to enhance situation awareness across all levels of an organisation.

Let's explore what situation awareness is and how digital twins can be leveraged to improve it.

Understanding Situation Awareness

Situation awareness (SA) is the perception of environmental elements within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status into the near future.

SA operates on three distinct levels:

  1. Perception (Level 1): This is the basic level of awareness, where individuals perceive the status, attributes, and dynamics of relevant elements in their environment. In an industrial context, this could involve understanding the current state of equipment, work, and vehicle locations.

  2. Comprehension (Level 2): At this level, individuals integrate disparate pieces of information to understand the current situation. It's about grasping the significance of perceived information and its implications for the overall operation. Key to this is being able to see and interrogate current goals and work plans.

  3. Projection (Level 3): The highest level of SA involves forecasting future actions based on the current situation. It requires the ability to anticipate potential scenarios and plan accordingly.

The Challenge of VUCA Environments

Modern industrial operations often face VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) conditions, which can significantly impact situation awareness:

  • Volatility: Rapid and unpredictable changes in the operational environment

  • Uncertainty: Lack of predictability and increased potential for surprises

  • Complexity: Multiple interconnected factors influencing operations

  • Ambiguity: Unclear or mixed meanings of conditions and information

These VUCA elements can make it challenging for operators and decision-makers to maintain high levels of situation awareness, especially when multiple decision makers are remote from the location of work.

Digital Twins: Enhancing Situation Awareness

Digital twins provide a virtual representation of physical assets, processes, or systems, offering real-time insights and enabling predictive capabilities. Here's how digital twins can enhance situation awareness across all three levels:

Perception Enhancement

Digital twins provide a comprehensive, real-time overview of operations, visualising the status, location and dynamics of relevant elements in the environment.

This enhanced visibility allows users to quickly identify potential issues, risks, and anomalies, improving their perception of the current situation.

 

Comprehension Improvement

By integrating disparate pieces of information into a coherent whole, digital twins help users understand the implications of various factors on overall operations

This integration of planned work and production data supports faster and more accurate comprehension of complex situations.

 

Projection Capabilities

Digital twins, combined with predictive AI or simulation tools, can forecast future scenarios based on current conditions. Being able to visualise planned work vs current work and locations also enables highly efficient work management such as Short Interval Control.

This capability enhances users' ability to project potential outcomes and make proactive decisions.

 

Mitigating Cognitive Overload

In VUCA environments, the sheer volume and complexity of information can lead to cognitive overload, hindering effective decision-making. Digital twins help mitigate this challenge by:

  1. Providing context-specific visualisations tailored to individual user roles and responsibilities (i.e. reducing the number of things on the screen to the most important)

  2. Integrating multiple data sources into a single, coherent interface

  3. Offering intuitive representations of complex data and relationships

 

Collaborative Decision-Making

Digital twins enable shared situation awareness among team members, fostering better communication and collaborative problem-solving

By providing a common visual reference, digital twins facilitate:

  • Improved coordination between different departments or teams

  • Faster alignment and improved context on critical issues and potential solutions

  • More effective knowledge sharing across the organisation

 

Continuous Learning and Improvement

Digital twins not only enhance real-time situation awareness but also support continuous learning and improvement:

  1. Capturing and analysing historical data to identify patterns and trends

  2. Enabling scenario simulations to test and refine operational strategies

  3. Providing a platform for training and skill development in a risk-free virtual environment

 

Conclusion

Digital twins offer a powerful solution for enhancing situation awareness in complex industrial environments. By providing real-time visibility, integrating disparate data sources, and enabling predictive capabilities, digital twins help businesses navigate VUCA conditions more effectively.

As industries continue to evolve and face new challenges, leveraging digital twins for improved situation awareness will become increasingly crucial for maintaining operational excellence and safety. By implementing digital twin technology, businesses can empower their workforce with the tools and insights needed to make better decisions, respond more effectively to changing conditions, and ultimately drive improved performance and safety across their operations.

Reach out to learn more about using digital twins to improve safety at your site.

What We Offer

Rapid Assessment & Benchmarking

We assess your existing operating environment, systems and data, to give you multiple options for overcoming your operational and safety challenges.

Customised Digital Twin Design

We design a bespoke Safety Digital Twin tailored to your specific operational needs, integrating data from multiple sources to create a comprehensive virtual representation of your operational environment.

Seamless Integration & Implementation

We work with your safety and technology teams to ensure a smooth implementation process, minimising disruption to safety and operational staff while maximising the benefits of your new Safety Digital Twin.

Key Features of a Safety Digital Twin

Real-Time Visualisation

Experience an intuitive, real-time visual representation of your safety-critical operations, enabling quick perception and comprehension of potential hazards, and improving the management of work.

Advanced Data Integration

Our Safety Digital Twins seamlessly integrate data from various sources, including SCADA, collission and IOT sensors, cameras, permit, access control & work management systems, providing a holistic view of your operational environment including in progress, planned and predicted work.

Collaborative Decision-Making

Enable shared situation awareness among team members and decision makers regardless of their lcoation, fostering better communication and collaborative problem-solving in safety-critical scenarios. Role and user based views are customised to ensure right data-right place-right time context.

The Geminum Safety Twin visualises and highlights in-progress and planned activities in near real time, enabling effective and collaborative safety and work management.

Benefits of a Safety Digital Twin

Enhanced situation awareness across all levels and locations:

  • Improved decision-making in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments

  • Reduced cognitive overload for safety and decision making personnel through user and role specific views

  • Proactive identification and mitigation of potential safety risks

  • Increased operational efficiency without compromising safety

  • Better compliance with safety regulations and standards

Enable AI & Predictive Models to be used safely by:

  • Comparing probabilistic outputs with in-progress and planned work

  • Giving front line decision makers the ability to see predictions and decide whether to accept or reject (and feed this back to the data team)

  • Quickly bolting in and out new AI models and capabilities within the system that provides context of your safety and work management activities

Why Choose Us?

Our team combines deep expertise in digital twin technology with a thorough understanding of industrial operations & safety requirements. We don't just provide a tool – we offer a comprehensive solution designed with your people to elevate your safety practices to new heights, in the context of your operating environment.

We literally wrote the book on designing digital twins in industrial environments, and we bring that expertise to you so you don’t need to know anything about digital twins to benefit from these new ways of working.

Ready to transform your approach to operational safety? Contact us today to learn how our Safety Digital Twin service can help you create a safer, more efficient operating environment.