Digital twins enhance nuclear clean-up efficiency for Washington River Protection Solutions
Project facts
- ClientWashington River Protection Solutions
- LocationRichland, Washington State, USA
- ChallengeWith 56 million gallons of nuclear waste to dispose of, WRPS needed to enhance staff safety while reducing the time associated with the clean-up and minimise environmental impact
- SolutionA simulation digital twin to create a business case, evalutating value and cost, as well as a proof-of-concept operational digital twin to support internal teams answering complex questions
- ImpactWRPS stakeholders recognise the strategic value of the digital twins, using them to inform crucial decisions, while increasing safety and decreasing the mission duration
A key aspect of its mission involves minimising the time associated with clean-up, given that operational costs add up to millions of dollars a day. The mission needs to be achieved while ensuring people’s safety and wellbeing and minimising environmental impact. It is a great and complex challenge that requires the best-available technology.
Within the organisation, several teams identified digital twins as the solution that will best support operations throughout the next few decades. One such team is ‘Mission Analysis Engineering’, which has been driving this initiative over the last few years. This is not a coincidence, as this team has an impressive capability in operations research (OR) and predictive simulation, which are intrinsically connected with digital twins.
The challenge
Ensuring safety in the most cost effective and optimised way
The WRPS mission is a challenge in itself: planning each operation and making sure, in each step, that everything is working correctly and safety is guaranteed. To accomplish this job, WRPS requires the best-available expertise and technology. Also, given the costly nature of the mission and anticipated long mission duration, it is important to ensure processes and operations are designed in the most optimal and cost-effective way. Since Hanford Site clean-up began, different organisations and teams have managed the site with the different tooling and technologies available. Because data is scattered through these different tools and departments, it is complex to analyse and – most of the time – is not of suitable quality. To succeed, WRPS needs the right information available at each moment to make the right decisions. However, the current systems and tools do not meet the required level for this mission. This leads to reactive responses that often aren’t quick enough, which increases lead times and operational costs.
In recent years, with the latest technology advances, several teams are pursuing the opportunity gap to expand the usage and value of data. These are some of the reasons why they approached Royal HaskoningDHV to implement digital twin solutions to support 24/7 operations. However, a solution like this involves different stakeholders and departments, with different objectives and urgent needs, e.g., process control or field production operations engineering. Alignment between all interested parties is crucial for having a common vision on the solution and roadmap. That is why commitment from relevant head departments is a ‘must’ to go ahead.
The main goal is to deliver the mission as quickly as possible, while maintaining safety for employees and minimising environmental impact. This means answering critical business questions, in a timely fashion, with confidence. In parallel to the main goal, there are other milestones the teams would like to achieve, such as having a single source of truth, taking proactive measures like predictive maintenance and preserving knowledge from the most experienced workers.
The solution
Digital twin business case development and Proof-of-Concept to answer complex challenges
Given the complexity of the required solution, the first phase included two work packages.
The first was focused on creating a business case, evaluating value versus cost. For the value, teams carried out several workshops to define and prioritise digital twin use cases to ensure the proposed solution responds precisely to the various and most important ones. For the cost, teams designed a first draft of the solution architecture.
The second work package was about creating a proof-of-concept (PoC) internal teams could use to:
- Test the digital twin concept
- Better understand the value from the digital twin and communicate more effectively with decision-makers about what they needed
In essence, the PoC functioned as well as a proof-of-value and a comprehensive demonstrator. This was done by connecting different building blocks from Twinn’s software portfolio (Twinn is the digital solutions brand of Royal HaskoningDHV):
The impact
Stakeholder buy-in to the critical role of digital twins to support complex operations
The two-work-package approach has enhanced WRPS teams' understanding of a digital twin’s potential benefits. With support from key stakeholders, the focus has shifted from questioning the need for a digital twin (“Do we need a digital twin?”) to actively strategising on how to make it a reality (“How do we make this happen?”).
Envisioning the solution, getting the support from required stakeholders, and setting a course of action is key for WRPS given the complexity of its operations. While this process may span months due to the project's scale, strategic significance, and contractual dependencies, the perspective shift is clear. Stakeholders now recognise the critical role digital twins play in providing timely insights to inform crucial decisions, aligning them with the mission at hand, and underscoring the importance of achieving its transformative goal.
