Prioritising Point of needVornel Walker, intergraPh, Usa, oUtlines

the integrity of information aVailability at Point of need to the facilitation of accUrate

decision making in Plants.

If one were to visit any facility one would expect, and hope, that the site had up to date documentation and that it would be available at a moment’s notice. Many occupational health and standards authorities worldwide have mandated that at the least piping and instrumentation

diagrams (P&IDs) should be in an electronic format, which at least would help with legibility.

The problem is that, when looking at a gate valve on the P&ID, that symbol represents much more than just a flow control device on a process or utility line; it represents a physical object in space, an object with a history and, one hopes, a long and useful future; until, that is, it is time to replace it. But even at this point of replacement the P&ID may not change at all, and that is because the process flow control capabilities are still adequately represented by the same symbol on the P&ID. Therefore, life for the number one control document in a facility can continue as if nothing has happened.

75

HE_75-78_JULY13.indd 75 27/06/2013 08:38

76July 2013 Hydrocarbon EnginEEring

However, the truth is that something did happen, and what happened was not only significant, but it was supported by carefully created documentation of maybe hundreds or thousands of pages, pages that need to be retained for future retrieval.

Intelligent P&IDs: Only part of the answerThe promise of legible and intelligent P&IDs has always been the touch stone of plant documentation. The sad thing is that 100 plant owners could be asked what defines an intelligent P&ID and if really lucky one would get 50 answers. However, at base level, all would agree that each entity on the P&ID represents a physical entity, and there should be some way of pulling up information that links that symbol to that physical entity.

Having these goals for intelligence is a good start, especially if done from the beginning. This would mean that when information is created it would be retained and that retention would then allow others downstream to benefit from the information captured. But the sad truth is that much of this information is not always made available to those producing these P&IDs. Like it or

not, the process of adding or linking information to P&IDs through the engineering, construction and operation phases of a plant is both recursive and iterative, and therefore difficult to control.

Perhaps, if the above goal was established from ‘day one’, it could be met, but many facilities have histories dating back to the early 20th century. What hope then is there for this perfect world of up to date site information?

With current work practices, to be absolutely sure that a living facility had up to date documented information, would mean that there would have to be freeze in site operations for there to be any hope of creating an accurate information baseline. And with that last statement one can see the enormity of the commitment that has to be made to have current and retrievable sources of information.

Reality checkWhat the software industry often forgets is that most information gathering is done to help someone make a decision, hopefully the best possible decision at that moment. This being the case, it is important that the best info is made available at the point of need.

All have to take a deep breath and be realistic about how much information needs to be collected and for what purpose this information is to be used. So when looking at owners’ drivers for information gathering and retrieval one can see that they generally fall into the following seven categories:

n Safety. n Emergency. n Operations. n Maintenance. n Expansion/decommissioning and demolition. n Asset inventorying. n Asset transference.

The first, safety, is the most critical and the last, asset transference, while not critical for safety or operations, may nonetheless be extremely important when needed.

So why say that the safety and emergency are high priority points of need? Well obviously personnel safety and emergency procedures are of paramount importance, that is a given. But the fact is that often the need of safety and emergency information is not always planned, and is almost always urgent. This means that gathering, collating and indexing of this information beforehand in a readily accessible form would be ideal.

Silos of expediencyOn any site one will find those one or two people that employees can always go to for information. It could be Jan for the information on the new compressor expansion. Bert in maintenance, who has been there for 30 years and does not even have to look at a drawing to find that leaky valve that is being searched for. And one will find that often each of these accomplished groups or people have their own way of storing and accessing information, a way that they have established that works well and efficiently for them.

The bottom line is that convenient as this is one can not keep relying on employees’ great memories and/or departmental specialisation to ensure that one has access to the best information. Likewise, one cannot risk retrieval on good health,

Figure 1. The cataloging of information has to be as automated as possible if it is to remain up to date and therefore relevant.

Figure 2. Item tags point to rich sources of data and interconnections that are often locked away in documents and inaccessible.

HE_75-78_JULY13.indd 76 27/06/2013 08:38

77 July 2013Hydrocarbon EnginEEring

accident, poor adherence to standards or people leaving one's employ: A better plan is needed!

A real problem?So is this a real problem? And if so, how bad is it? What is the scale of this information distribution and duplication?

One owner/operator, on recently acquiring a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit, during the transition, requested all of the information on the FPSO from the past owner, and its engineering support company. In answer to this request the new owner received 11 terabyte (TB) of hard drives full of information, which they were to find out was mostly unstructured.

In one case, the owner enquired as to how many P&IDs covered the asset and were advised by the engineering support company that there were 150. During the capture exercise, it found that there were over 7000 P&IDs distributed around the drives. Clearly there were many duplicates and at many stages of revision. After a full audit the new owner was finally able to determine that there were actually just over 300 master P&IDs for the asset. Double what was expected and 4% of what they originally received.

The truth is that there are 1000s of well operated functioning facilities that under the surface face the same challenges, and in an emergency situation could anyone be absolutely certain that they have the latest information that they require at their point of need? Out of the 7000 P&IDs mentioned, would anyone be able to find the right one at the right revision that will show which manual valve(s) needed to be shut down in an emergency?

Fake it 'til you make itSoftware vendors often speak about intelligent systems and information gathering and the downstream benefits that can come from having that information available to all stakeholders. On a positive note the truth is that those benefits are not only real, but can be quantified in hard cash.

Then what is not to like? Well, for one, a plant owner, whose assets can range in age from one week to sometimes 100 years, the task of documenting and collating information on an existing plant can seem daunting. This should be no surprise when information could be held in ink on linen drawings all the way up to fully intelligent 3D plant models.

So firstly, what can be done about existing information and secondly, how to gather information from work that has already been done? The scanning and digitising of older documentation has been a help but still the information that is locked within these documents can still be hard to get to, as is the many interrelations of one piece of information to another.

Let’s get physicalOne aspect of all of this that is often not mentioned and typically falls in the: expansion, decommissioning and demolition; asset inventorying; and asset transference, area is the physical as built documenting of an asset.

Gone are the days when an engineer had to make do with a plumb bob, tape measure and a scaffolding team to carry out the as built verification of an installation. Now owners can use the power and accuracy of lasers by picking points on a line and creating intelligent as built models, and deliverables, in the field as

is done using tools like a Leica Total Station and Intergraph® CADWorx® fieldPipe™.

Additionally, as is the growing case, owners are electing to scan portions of their facilities and intelligently tag scanned assets such as pumps, valves, vessels etc. But what is interesting is that unlike in the past, these point clouds are not just a sea of yellow, red, orange or green dots that seem formless, they now carry color and shade information about the asset being scanned.

These almost photo realistic scans can now serve as accurate windows into any part of the facility, and using tools like Leica TruView™ can allow the cloud based sharing, annotation and markup of any asset via an internet browser.

One advantage of these scanned and archived systems is that products like Intergraph CADWorx fieldPipe can be used, by picking surface points on the scanned model, to create fabrication deliverables or use the scanned model as a physical backdrop to design or modified layouts.

Putting it all togetherLooking at the previous example the 11 TB of information is equivalent to 4.8 trillion typewritten pieces of information or approximately 36 million CAD P&IDs! If one also scanned or

Figure 3. Photorealistic laser scanners such as the Leica laser scanner can be used to capture as built information, navigate a facility or create brownfield deliverables.

Figure 4. Sunray, Texas: 2008 explosion investigators say caused by gas escaping an ice damaged elbow in an out of service line. This is where accurate operational and emergency information is vital at the point of need.

HE_75-78_JULY13.indd 77 27/06/2013 08:38

78July 2013 Hydrocarbon EnginEEring

modelled data that, as was seen, are now becoming a feature of the growing body of information that represents the plant and its attendant information, then the amount of information represented is enormous.

Even so this data, in its audited and condensed state, would take months or years to fully allocate and cross reference. The truth is that if this is undertaken without a plan to automate the addition of new information as it is created, then the whole thing could fall back to its unstructured state.

Aims of existing and ongoing asset captureFrom whichever way one looks at it this massive quantity of data would typically take a dedicated and knowledgeable team of professionals a long time to index and link this information. Also, for ongoing capturing and classification of data everyone who touches that information would have to be involved. That being the case for any system to be successful to make this task as painless, accurate, and single touch as possible would have to be found.

So what should be the key points of such a system? n The asset identification retrieval system would have to be

simple to use. n The cataloging of existing data should be as painless and

automated as possible. n Tools and information should be widely available and

secure. n Searching and acquiring data should be easy and intuitive. n Information should be viewable on various devices to give

true point of need access. n The acquisition and cataloging of ongoing data should be

automated.

If these points were addressed the sun would still rise in the west, set in the east and the days would still contain 24 hours, but each of those cycles will be more productive, rewarding and also safer.

Tags, bugs and spidersIntergraph has worked closely with its users for many years to find ways to achieve these goals and has come up with a solution that it feels delivers on the above points. Intergraph SmartPlant® Fusion has been developed to rapidly capture, organise large volumes of previously unstructured information, as typically found in a facility, and make this data available through a simple web portal interface. During this development Intergraph have identified the following as main components of the solution mix that are needed to satisfy the above points:

Use of tags as identifiersOn any site items are typically identified by their unique tag name. When searching for data users usually use common sense terms in acquiring information about an asset. In an emergency situation if P-101, or ESDV-2001 are the usually used terms for say a particular pump or emergency shutdown valve, then that should be the term by which their information can be found.

System information crawlerExisting and ongoing information needs to be captured and indexed and the best way to do that is to use a system crawler, much like the Google® Googlebot. These allow hand free, rapid,

and continuous data acquisition of unstructured information on the system being interrogated. With user defined rules a crawler can identify and index multiple types of information including: documents, drawings, images, 3D models and laser scan images etc. for subsequent search.

Revision documentingAs mentioned earlier, a search of any system could throw up multiple instances of seemingly the same document. This is where giving users the ability to identify those documents, drawings, models or point clouds etc. that are to be used as masters to represent the as built state of an asset.

In document asset identificationIf any system just relied on the document names by which to index an asset then millions of interrelated links would be missed. Such a system would also need readers to interrogate in document and in drawing information and extract any cross reference tags and identifiers for system wide asset information linking and use. The same rings true for those documents that are not available in their electronic format and need to be scanned, in these cases optical character recognition (OCR) should be employed to drive information acquisition.

3D model navigationFacility information can be found in both its primordial form and in modern 3D models. Likewise, challenges exist at the more up to date form of data capture and creation. Many sites have been designed using multiple CAD and design engines, few of which share information natively.

There is little point in not dealing with the reality of plant owners’ situations. The truth is that they have existing electronic design information from multiple engineering companies using tools, that at the time, they felt worked best for them. So what use is it to facility owners to say that their information should be recreated in one vendor’s particular format before information can be extracted or used?

These design systems are so varied and could include: Intergraph SmartPlant 3D or SmartMarine® 3D, Intergraph PDS®, AVEVA® PDMS®, Intergraph CADWorx Plant, Bentley® AutoPLANT ® or Autodesk® AutoCAD® Plant 3D, each with their own way of representing the ‘truth’.

So the ideal system should have the ability to use this information as it is exists, so that users can navigate between the tagged assets inside the system and the streamed 3D model representation of the plant, regardless of the format to the information was originally created.

ConclusionThe maintenance of up to date, and therefore viable, site information has always been a challenge, with the elephants in the room being the acquisition of existing facilities’ data. Tools like Intergraph SmartPlant Fusion, Leica TruView and Intergraph CADWorx fieldPipe are now making that task, not only more palatable, but now realistic. In the 21st century there is now the chance to give all stake holders access to the latest information at their points of need so that they can make informed accurate decisions based on the best possible data.

HE_75-78_JULY13.indd 78 27/06/2013 08:38