Emerson Launches Sync Tool for Digital Twins in Power Plants

Emerson has released the Ovation Curation Tool, a synchronization software package that keeps power and water plant control systems aligned with their digital twin simulations. The tool automates version control and change tracking between production Ovation systems and the simulators that model them, targeting the drift that accumulates as engineers modify live plants over time.

Emerson describes it as a first-of-its-kind sync solution for control systems and digital twins, targeting operators who run high-fidelity simulations of their plants for training, testing, and engineering, and who have watched those models fall out of step with the equipment.

The Ovation Curation Tool. Image used courtesy of Emerson

The Configuration-Drift Problem

A digital twin is only useful while it matches the plant it mirrors. In power and water operations, utilities use these simulators to train operators, validate control-logic changes before they reach live equipment, and study how a plant will respond to new conditions.

Operators and engineers make continual changes to production control systems to solve problems, improve performance, and develop new control strategies. Each change nudges the plant's configuration away from the twin, and over time, the simulation no longer reflects reality.

Reconciling the two by hand means combing through configurations to find what changed, a comparison that can consume hours of engineering time and grows harder as plants age and staff turn over. As twins drift, they become more than an inconvenience: operators trained on a stale model rehearse procedures that no longer match the plant, and control strategies validated against an outdated simulation carry that error into production, where those simulations underpin operator certification and pre-deployment testing.

Emerson frames the Ovation Curation tool as a direct answer to that maintenance burden, and ties it to a broader staffing squeeze. The company states that keeping a digital twin permanently synced with live systems has always been challenging, and that this challenge continues to grow as workforce shortages make it more difficult to find and retain staff. Emerson says its tool helps ensure simulations remain relevant by improving testing, training, and forecasting.

Simulation Snapshot Impact Analysis. Image used courtesy of Emerson

Manual reconciliation relies on senior engineers who know a plant's control logic well enough to spot changes and judge whether those changes are safe to carry into the simulator. As experienced staff retire, that knowledge thins out. By automatically capturing changes and recording who made them, the tool aims to turn that knowledge into an auditable record the whole team can work from.

How the Curation Tool Works

The software can be scheduled to run at whatever frequency an organization chooses, whether weekly, monthly, or on demand, automatically identifying and logging any changes made to the control system. Those changes appear through a dashboard that records what changed, who made the change, and when it occurred. The resulting audit trail replaces manual configuration comparisons and reduces the risk of undocumented or unexpected changes slipping into a production system.

Once a set of changes has been validated, an engineer can launch automated synchronization in either direction: from the production system to the digital twin, or from the twin out to other Ovation control systems. Before any deployment, a simulation snapshot impact analysis tool details the disruptions a change will cause to the target system. It suggests resolutions, giving teams a preview of the consequences before a live update.

Data flow between repositories. Image used courtesy of Emerson

Under the dashboard, the Curation Tool uses a system of repositories to move data between production systems and simulators while keeping both synchronized. Multiple users can edit the same assets and merge their changes, a model that borrows the version-control conventions of software development and applies them to plant control configurations.

The audit history that records what changed, who changed it, and when also serves as a governance record, letting plant managers demonstrate that only reviewed, documented changes reached the live system, which is important in regulated power and water environments.

Availability

The bidirectional sync is aimed partly at operators who run more than one similar plant. Because the tool can push a validated change from a digital twin out to other Ovation control systems, a utility can develop and test a control-strategy update once and then propagate it across a fleet of comparable units, rather than reworking each site by hand.

The Ovation Curation Tool is part of Emerson's Ovation automation platform for power and water applications. Emerson plans to demonstrate the software at its Ovation Users Group Conference 2026, running July 26 to 30 in Pittsburgh. Additional product details are available on the Ovation Curation Tool page on Emerson's site.