Digital Oceans Canada

Energy Research and Innovation Newfoundland and Labrador (ERI) and Canada’s Ocean Supercluster are strong supporters of innovation in offshore ocean industries, including oil and gas. They also wanted to help organizations innovate faster and more cost-effectively. One solution ERI and Canada’s Ocean Supercluster were interested in creating was a new cloud-based platform to develop and utilize digital twins. This solution would also offer better asset integrity management, predictive maintenance, and operational safety training.

As part of Canada’s Ocean Supercluster, MNP Digital was involved in the very early stages of envisioning this platform. The final product would allow offshore maritime companies to validate equipment and operations in the virtual world before physically deploying to the harsh North Atlantic Ocean environment. The result is Digital Oceans Canada (DOC) —a platform as a service (PaaS) solution that is broadly applicable to organizations of all sizes in other industries, including energy and utilities, mining, and others.

Along with two simulation training companies, Virtual Marine and GRi, ERI and Canada’s Ocean Supercluster wanted to harness data and the cloud to create a digital twinning environment unlike any other. Partnering with Hatch, the group also saw the advantage of digital twinning for preventative maintenance to ensure asset integrity and reliability.

MNP Digital was an ideal addition to the consortium. Its strong understanding of Microsoft Azure, digital twinning, and highly secure platform development was key to the initiative’s success — as was its experience working with other major energy providers to create preventative maintenance technology.  

To create this platform, the major challenges included:

• Ensuring that data is anonymized and using approved, sanitized versions of proprietary data
• Establishing enhanced security and data governance practices and procedures so that the clients of DOC can be assured that the data is secure, private, accurate, and usable within the platform
• Giving users access to data within their own data partition, including data sets and models made publicly available that are hosted within DOC or linked from DOC
• Providing data quality metrics so users can assess the reliability, completeness, and relevance of the data for their objectives
• Ensuring other services, applications, development environments, and digital twin simulators within DOC would also be made available to users

With an idea in mind, and all the collaborating partners in place, the biggest challenge was coordinating all of the moving parts of this ambitious platform.

The MNP Digital team started by initiating a discovery phase with the rest of the team, then transforming key learnings into an implementation plan. MNP Digital was part of the overall program management team and delivered the central platform onto which other services were built.

The platform was designed and built using Microsoft Azure, taking full advantage of the benefits of cloud computing. As a result, clients benefit from instant scalability without investing in hardware and IT resources. The platform also empowers research and development, leveraging pre-built data models to support artificial intelligence, machine learning, and process modelling.

MNP Digital ensured that each user would have a secure landing zone with access to data models that accurately reflected ocean conditions and environments. This would provide potential clients the confidence to perform mission-critical and proprietary work.

The team chose to integrate the Ocean Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU™), an open-source data platform designed for the offshore energy industry. This decision provided enormous volumes of data and data management capabilities for development and validation — further reducing clients’ time to market for new solutions. This foundational infrastructure also provides data governance processes, including metadata management for structured or unstructured data sets, and data pipeline solutions tailored to organizations of all sizes.

Additionally, these landing zones (and the platform as a whole) place heavy emphasis on cyber security. They surpass both the defined public sector standards and even Exxon’s Enterprise Architecture Principles, which go far beyond standard Azure security controls. Secure data access can be managed through a variety of methods, from separation within the infrastructure, to row–level user-based access within a given data model. This ensures data is only available to users with authorized access permissions.

Finally, MNP Digital built the customer-facing website, informing the public about the DOC project, in addition to an e-commerce backend for direct service.

The approach was 100 percent collaborative, leaning on the hundreds of years of collective experience from the experts at each organization. Each organization’s knowledge was drawn upon to create a groundbreaking innovation. The value of the solution isn’t just the platform, but everything the advisors and builders could offer users on top of that.

The solution includes:

DOC created a solution that significantly accelerates the deployment of digital solutions for better decision-making for Canada’s marine industry. This collaborative platform for research, development, and digital twin technologies and data allows for shared costs, tools, and data — driving innovation and enhancing value creation while reducing time to market.

DOC also empowers research and development using pre-built data models. The data models accurately reflect ocean conditions and environments, including vessel models, so users don’t need to pay for expensive, and often dangerous, physical sea trials when validating technology.

The platform will continue to evolve, offering new functionality and self-service capabilities based on our clients’ changing needs. These ongoing updates will further advance data use and management, as well as refine the platform itself, making marine environment and equipment twinning and operator and safety training even better.

Finally, third parties can come together via the DOC Digital Laboratory, a collaborative digital space within the platform, for digital analysis and to develop software and applications. The DOC Digital Laboratory facilitates simulation, research, and innovation using DOC services, resources, and data. It’s a shared space that allows organizations to collaborate to drive technology and solutions forward.