16 July 2021
The emergence of Smart Cities will put an even greater requirement on energy infrastructure to keep pace. In a recent interview with Innovation & Insight Middle East Magazine, Geraud Meyer, CEO of Saudi based Assystem Radicon, shares the positive impact that digital engineering is having on the safety, security and cost of energy projects today.
How does digital transformation affect the energy sector?
In the energy sector, during construction phases, digital technology is rejuvenating the way projects are developed and thus changing the way project management and engineering are executed, taking advantage of new possibilities. During operations & maintenance phases, digital transformation considers the critical dimension of infrastructures and their obligation of service continuity.
Bringing together the physical world and the digital world of energy infrastructures, digital is enabling simulation and scenarios, leveraging the potential of data, for instance optimising production by anticipating breakdowns, or enabling the transition from document to data.
It is also a way to adopt ‘smarter’ work methods, develop solutions to improve productivity, create digital skills internally and attract new talent.
Tell us a little of Assystem’s plans for developing technologies for the future…
Assystem has an initiative called ‘Engineering Powered by Digital’ to propose advanced services for improving the competitiveness of the services offered, the performance of the projects and being able to reach the optimal solutions in the ambient complexity. Whenever there is an opportunity to improve our efficiency and productivity with digital, we go for it!
This initiative is organised around three main principles: firstly, focus on the user experience and the main pain points, then document to data transformation and finally using a system instead of disciplines approach. These main principles have driven four pillars of the Engineering Powered by Digital initiative as the following services: data science & artificial intelligences services, digital system engineering services, digital field services and project control services.
These services are operated by the Assystem Digital Engineering team, whose mission is to deploy those services & solutions for Assystem customers but also within Assystem’s organisation.
In Saudi Arabia we have already reached an advanced level in our digital transformation. For example, all our design projects are delivered under BIM 3D, with automatic clash detection and some of them with 4D and 5D; we use artificial intelligence on a daily basis for enhancing our productivity, especially on repetitive tasks, data aggregation for our contractual and technical libraries and digital reporting for our sites’ supervision.
To find out more about how Assystem can support your digital project, have a look to our digital use-cases.