# Opportunities and Challenges to Develop Digital Twins for Subsea Pipelines
## 3 Automated Creation of the Digital Twin during Construction  
The oil and gas industry has been adopting digital twins of asset life cycle management (ALCM) in recent years. Subsea pipelines are unique when compared to other major infrastructure assets due to the fact that they are buried immediately during construction and are used to transport hazardous and explosive contents at high pressures. These facts result in an enormous responsibility for all phases of a pipeline asset's life cycle, including construction, operation, and long-term integrity management. To accurately trace the condition of a pipeline asset at any time in its lifecycle to previous environmental conditions, operational conditions or events during its life, a single source of truth representing the entire meter-by-meter condition of the asset (i.e., a digital twin), must be created. The creation of the pipeline digital twin during pipeline construction can lead to a full representation of the asset from creation to decommissioning, which construction management, quality control, engineering and integrity can all refer to [63]. The goal is to create the data required by inspectors during construction and capture it in such a manner that it can also be easily or instantly accessed and used by the operator during construction for quality management and operations and maintenance post-commissioning. Field trials were completed to test and evaluate workflows and sensor platforms for the creation of digital twins for pipelines in 2017 [63]. After pipeline stringing, welding, and lowering, the open ditch and lowered pipe were scanned in the final resting position prior to backfilling. The laser imaging, detection, and ranging (LiDAR) system and downward-facing camera were suspended above the open ditch on the side-mounted boom. The system has a measurement rate of up to 700,000 measurements per second, high accuracy fibre optic gyro (FOG) inertial measurement units (IMU), and a high-end survey-grade global positioning system (GPS). The trials resulted in highly accurate pipeline centrelines, weld locations, depth to cover (DoC), and ditch geometry capture in digital formats. The resulting point clouds contain about 6.2 million highly-accurate points over a scan distance of 370 m. The weld location was added to the geographic information system (GIS) based on the imagery interpretation. In addition to the remote sensing method, techniques of magnetic flux leakage and acoustic detection are commonly used to detect the cracks of subsea pipelines. One of the limitations of the LiDAR inspection is the assumption used in the algorithm of the software. Since visualization is one key feature of digital transformation, methods to obtain an accurate and useable result from the massive amount of measurement data need to be developed and improved in the further application of digital twins. A pipeline design automation was introduced based on the cloud-based digital twin McDermott SubseaXD [64]. SubseaXD is collaborating with Dassault Systemes/Simulia to leverage their 3D Experience platform with a smart, collaborative PLM platform. The web-based graphical user interface (GUI) worked as an integrated system producing a 3D digital field diagram, together with all pipeline design calculations in one digital platform. Various calculations, including wall thickness calculations based on API/DNV/ASME code check, on-bottom stability analysis, pipeline span analysis, pipeline end expansion analysis, out of straightness analysis, and pipeline buckling analysis are performed sequentially and systematically in the cloud using the metadata information (i.e., pipe data, soil, environment) available through Python-based API from the digital field data. Abaqus and Orcaflex are integrated with the SubseaXD, which can be used for detailed finite element analysis (FEA). It was stated that the automated pipeline design can save hours with fewer errors, thus saving on cost.