Dr. Abdullah Al-Halafi

Dr. Abdullah Al-Halafi is currently the Project Manager for the Corporate Digital Twin Platform development program with Saudi Aramco, in addition to his role as Networks and Systems Lead Engineer bringing more than 20 years of industrial operations, maintenance and projects execution, as well as academic and research experiences.

He holds KAUST Ph.D., Glasgow M.Sc., and KFUPM B.Sc., all in Electrical Engineering. He started his professional career with SABIC as an Electrical Engineer and a maintenance supervisor, then later joined ABB as Projects Manager where he delivered large-scale communications and control systems projects. He later joined Saudi Aramco managing several upstream projects before he was awarded a scholarship for an advanced degree program (PhD). Afterwards, he was assigned with Aramco R&DC leading the Advanced Sensors research, and then joined Engineering Services working at the Process and Control Systems Department with Plants Network Group.

In his current role he is supporting the Digital Transformation Program, advising senior and executive management and several Aramco Joint Ventures and subsidiaries on major transformational technologies, as well as Capital Programs Efficiency and Optimization opportunities by adopting Digital Twin technology in particular. He has lead the alignment with several Aramco organizations to form the company vision and strategies, and to establish standardization for developing and implementing Digital Twin for engineering and construction of Capital Programs, and in building the engineering data foundation that can lead to longer-term excellence in operational assets safety, reliability and sustainability. He also lead in managing the deployment of IoT and Edge AI for safety monitoring applications, and for forming strategies for wireless connectivity, wireless sensor networks, and industrial Internet-of-Things.

Dr. Abdullah is an author, speaker and innovator with several technology Patents. He published in multiple IEEE top-tier conferences and journals, and is also invited regularly as a senior reviewer for leading IEEE journals. On volunteering: he was an Executive Committee Member of International Society of Automation-ISA, where he served as a Chief Editor for ISA-Saudi newsletter, a Conference Chairman for Digitalization Towards Net-Zero conference, and as the Vice President of ISA-Saudi. He is also an advisory board committee member of the Future Digital Twin conference.