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Connected digital twin for gas stations

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Today, a gas station is much more than a recharging point. It has become an urban facility offering a number of valuable services (car wash, 24/7 store, electric recharging, etc…). Eventually, it will also be extended to a local photovoltaic micro-plant or a proximity communications center.

Retailers in this market, should explore the opportunities created by the digitization of gas stations, viewing them as a fully connected retail store, much more than a service facility. This new perspective will produce an enormous amount of data, such as customer behavior tracking, real-time data from gas pumps, car washers, and smart building systems.

Taking advantage of digital gas station opportunities means identifying and exploiting opportunities to use that data for innovative business outcomes.

HOW WE HELP

The retail unit of one of Europe’s largest oil and gas companies, engaged with Galeo in an ambitious program to realize the connected service station concept. Among others, the objectives of the project were the following:

  • End-to-end data platform: the creation of the corporate multimodal IoT platform to support the integration of all third-party software and hardware (system providers, maintainers, operators, etc.) of a gas station.
  • Data ownership for internal innovation: The company is the sole owner of all data generated at the gas station, which ends up integrated into its corporate data platform. Beyond ownership, this approach gives the company full freedom to combine data in innovative ways.
  • Open platform approach: the modular design of the platform allows third party companies to contribute to the Connected Digital Twins model, both by providing data associated with their assets and intellectual property related to their accompanying services.
  • Cybersecurity and data privacy. The strict legal framework around safety and security at gas stations is expanding as digital capabilities are added to systems, underscoring the importance of low-level IoT lifecycle management.
Connected digital twin for gas stations

RESULTS

The creation of the Digital Gas Station platform has begun to produce commercial value for our customers. Aside from increased efficiency and visibility into operational processes, integrated data capture has opened up the possibilities for other data-driven opportunities, such as:

  • Cross-selling campaigns: combining traditional selling -gasoline- with additional value-added services -car washing- based on the combined demand patterns detected in the data.
  • Build a marketing intelligence tool for gas station services to understand the dynamics of a gas station compared to other nodes in the network in terms of sales, services and traffic.
  • Define a standardized IoT architecture for Digital Gas Stations, which will be progressively deployed throughout the network with more than 5000 distributed nodes.