Building Aibel’s engineering ontologyThe Source for engineering information – and The Path that leads to it

About Aibel

■ Aibel AS is a service company that

works within the oil, gas and renewable

energy sectors.

■ Services include Engineering,

Procurement, and Construction,

EPC, type projects.

Plan■ The EPC Project

■ Managing Requirements

■ Building the Enterprise Ontology

■ Architecture

■ Sample Uses

■ Outlook

Ontology for the Material Master

■ There is no such thing as a standard project

■ Design rules are project specific

■ Material catalogues are project specific

■ A Material Master catalogue serves to

■ uniquely identify material

■ select project material (~10K variants) as a subset of a company global catalogue

■ provide requirements-based documentation of validity of design.

■ Material Master as ontology: The Source

■ Integrate subject domains

■ Maintain consistency

■ Incremental development

■ Material Master as Linked Data: The Path

■ Integrated, accessible, and application independent

The EPC Project

Project

definition

System

engineering

Area engineering

Procurement Construction

The EPC Project

handover handover handover handover

Disciplines in the EPC project

■ Architecture and Building

■ Civil Engineering

■ Drilling

■ Electrical

■ Engineering Management

and Administration

■ Geoscience

■ Health, Safety and

Environment

■ HVAC

■ Instrumentation

■ Marine Engineering

■ Material Technology

■ Mechanical

■ Multidiscipline

■ Operation and

Maintenance

■ Pipelines

■ Piping

■ Process

■ Procurement

■ Reservoir

■ Structural

■ Subsea

■ Telecommunication

■ Weight and Quantity

Control

P&ID 3D

Change in mindset - Motivation

Information transfer

Finisheddocument

Information sharing

Design Information

P&ID 3D

Managing Requirements

Piping BulkPiping is the initial discipline

to be included in The Source

Standards for Piping Bulk

■ Standards govern every aspect of the Piping Bulk discipline

■ Shapes and Dimensions (~90 relevant standards listed in ASME B31.3)

■ Materials and Fabrication (~150)

■ Standards are issued as documents, with regular revisions

■ Standards have a long life – Revisions are issued on a regular basis

■ The body of standards grows with introduction of new technologies

■ Standards bodies include

■ ASME

■ ASTM

■ API

■ ISO

■ NORSOK

Requirements Management

■ An EPC project is structured around the complex of requirements

■ Regulatory Requirements ■ E.g., European Pressure Equipment Directive (PED)

■ Design Code ■ Basic restrictions, ~10

■ Customer Requirements■ Statoil: ~1000 Material Data Sheet (MDS) specifications

■ Standards

■ Engineers and designers work creatively within the bounds

■ Every stage of project execution is governed by requirements:

■ Engineering

■ Procurement

■ Construction

Customer Requirements

■ A piping class sheet states customer requirements for process plant piping

■ Example: Statoil’s ED201 piping class sheet lays out the requirements for Troll A

ED201 Class Definition

Design

Code

Standard

Dimensions

Temperature/

Pressure

ED201 Material Requirement

Component

Type

Dimensional

Standard

Material

Standard

Additional

Client

requirements

Building the Enterprise Ontology

The personnel issue

ontology

expert

project

manager

engineer

The Team

■ Engineering domain/discipline experts

■ Interpret domain standards …

■ to build the domain ontology

■ to maintain the ontology

■ Enterprise IT department

■ Providing the IT infrastructure

■ Supported by IT suppliers

■ Application developers

■ Internal

■ External

■ Ontology experts

■ Overall ontology structure

■ Modeling patterns

Standard documents into ontology

■ Work from the official documents issued by the standards bodies, as these are the original

and normative sources

■ Some of the material requires extensive “manual” work, reading and interpreting the content

■ Some of this will end up in the “core” parts, handcrafted upper ontology

■ Typically, a range of a physical property, or a material category (by chemistry/by production

process) is the basis for establishing a standard class.

■ The bulk of the ontology represents tables of restrictions on the various types regulated by

the standard

Architecture

Parts of the system

Linked Data

■ Every term in the ontology has its own

web address (URI)

■ The namespace is Aibel internal:

■ http://data.aibel.com/

■ The Linked Data HTML pages provide a

minimalistic look-up service for users

■ The Linked Data RDF data sets provide a

simple entry point for applications that

need to reference ontology classes

Usage examples

Exploring product designs

Requirements

■ The ontology can represent temperature/pressure range constraints

■ Compare requirements using standard visualization tools

Requirements

■ Customer requirements may diverge from the standard

Requirements

■ Adding project data to the graph -- process design, part of the systems engineering phase

Searching databases

■ Checking and cross-checking data is an everyday task, but

■ Current tools are inflexible

■ “Get much more data than you need into Excel spreadsheets, then use filters and lookup functions”

■ IT support staff is elevated to crucial engineering project staff for the ability to write SQL

■ Engineers modify SQL queries, hoping to hit the target

■ The Source can be queried for reference information using familiar terminology

■ “List the ASME B16.5 flanges that are suitable for use in an ED201 compliant design”

■ “Can I use a flat face flange for connecting size 4 piping in this project?”

■ “Which, if any, welded and seamless pipe types are interchangeable in the project for size 4?”

Project definition and execution Reference information available anywhere Preparing for Ontology Based Data Access

Outlook

Questions?

©

2008