Digital Prime brings real-time AI to your control system’s digital twin
The concept of the digital twin is perhaps the centerpiece of digital transformation when it comes to the industrial enterprise. Think about it: What if the same digital model used to optimize the design of an industrial facility or other complex machine “lives on” in the form of a simulation that can optimize the real-time performance of the system itself?
Such is the concept underlying the Honeywell Digital Prime offering, a key Demo Center focus of the Honeywell Users Group 2025 conference in San Antonio. “Powered by Honeywell Forge connectivity solutions and enabled by AI, Digital Prime brings all of the connected offerings within Honeywell Process Solutions together to deliver real-time performance insights to our customers,” explained Anand Vishnubhotla, chief technology officer, Honeywell Process Solutions, from a dramatic, cube-shaped enclosure on the Demo Center floor peppered with larger-than-life Digital Prime displays.
“We are trying to tackle the biggest challenges our customers are facing today in maintaining their overall automation infrastructure and also delivering real outcomes using operational data,” Vishnubotla explained.
Test updates before implementation
And those real-time challenges often intensify soon after startup, for example, to test system changes before implementation to avoid process disruptions or potential safety incidents. Best practice also increasingly demands a well-documented digital management of change (MOC) process.
Systems replicating the operating environment can provide a safe environment for testing changes without risking disruption to the live operation. However, even where a lab system is in place, over time it will fail to reflect the modifications, updates, upgrades and expansions that occur, diminishing its utility. For smaller projects and regular testing of new hot fixes and back-ups, building a new digital twin is simply impractical. Projects are executed and tested on the live system, contributing to problems, disruption and delays.
“Instead, Digital Prime provides an ‘always on’ simulation of one’s automation infrastructure,” said Vishnubotla. “It helps automation managers maintain not only system health and compliance but readily access all the information about their lifecycle management, about their asset inventories, about how they can migrate their systems and continue to operate in a risk-free manner.”
A check on system errors
Digital Prime is supported by a range of proven solutions, including Honeywell Trace, the data collection software and change management system for more efficient troubleshooting and project planning. Capturing and recording configuration data, it tracks changes, identifies engineering anomalies, eliminates errors and accelerates project planning.
“Honeywell Trace can tell the customer not only when something is going wrong, but what it is that’s gone wrong,” Vishnubhotla said. As an example, he cited a configuration change that caused a CPU overrun within a controller module. “Honeywell Trace will detect that anomaly and enable services notifications,” he said. “These will come together with AI and ML [machine learning] predictions, really helping our customers do their task much more easily and bringing all that expertise right to the person within the digital prime ecosystem.
