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Deploying ISO15926 today and tomorrow Adrian Laud

Noumenon Consulting Ltd April 2013

Interoperability has been of increasing importance for many years and ISO15926 has become the focus for process plant. Over the last few years there has been a surge of interest through the activities by PCA and FIATECH as well as from the iRING User Group. Nearly all of these activities have had a technology drive, either from the standards side or semantic web technologies. However, the power of ISO15926 is in the flexibility of the methodology enabling a wide variety of technologies to be used to deploy it.

These projects include the operators BP (5 projects), Chevron (3 projects), ConocoPhillips (2 projects), Petronas, Shell (4 projects), Statoil (3 projects), Woodside as well as EPCs Bechtel, Fluor, Worley Parsons and others. This article is focussed on the business requirements that are driving the need for ISO15926, how these have been met over the last ten years, what is commercially available today, as well as commercial extensions being developed to meet the increasingly sophisticated requirements. The business requirement has been highlighted by several reports including that of NIST (2004) that put a figure of $16 million per year being the cost of not having interoperability. This is seen as both tactical and strategic with the priority to deliver tactical solutions that fit with the strategic objective rather than the usual point to point solution. The standards activities for ISO15926 have been focussed on the Reference Data Library (RDL) which is the basis of any implementation of the standard. The classes covered to date have been for structure, attributes and recently for graphics and

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geometry – where the classes define the terms but not their content. From the class definitions much of the plant model structure, and object content, can be inferred but it is not explicit. Whilst this is part of the scheme of the flexible data model, guidelines are required to enable information to be exchanged in a meaningful way. Also, to transfer payload for P&ID and their graphics, annotation, symbols basic rules are needed. For geometry part 3 of the standard is taken from STEP part 42 which has proved the model for graphics and geometry for many years. The XMpLant Schema was developed as a way to define how the RDL classes were organised to form objects and the general organisation of their contents. Additional classes were also introduced to support annotation, symbols / components and presentation. The Schema was put in the public domain in 2001 and has been adopted by many companies as a pragmatic solution for the deployment of ISO15926. Whilst the Schema defined the scope required at that time, because it was defining specialisations of the generic plant item, extension were easy to add and the Schema grew with use – a continual development driven by the business requirements. The PCA / FIATECH collaboration known as the IDS-ADI Matrix123 initiative became the “Proteus” project with its focus on defining the model for intelligent P&ID and 3D. As the XMpLant Schema was previously derived from the implied ISO15926 model and had already been proven in over 80 major commercial projects, it was taken as the basis for documenting the required Proteus model. After a critical review, the project adopted XMpLant Schema V3.3.3 as the “Proteus Schema” (also known as “Dictionary XML”). This model defining the P&ID and 3D models was published as IDS-ADI (PCA / FIATECH) documents in March 2009. This included all aspects of the structure, attributes, 2D graphics and 3D geometry as well as annotation and Shape Catalogues for symbols and component definitions. Subsequently, these documents have been used as input for the definition of requirements of Templates and Template patterns. A Reference Data Service (RDS) has been hosted by PCA for some years but this is read only. Another IDS-ADI project delivered the RDS WIP that allowed those in the IDS-ADI projects to be able to register new classes and, through a service developed by the iRING User Group, add their definition to sandboxes. JORD - (Joint Operational Reference Data) is a joint PCA / FIATECH project to address the medium to long term issue of ensuring that there is a sustainable RDS for access to existing classes as well as for any company to be able to propose new classes. This now replaces the temporary RDLs and is the home for Template and Template pattern definitions. In parallel with the JORD development, the iRING User Group has developed some open source tools (iRINGTools) which can be used by companies for their own development of semantic web implementations. There are many articles on these activities as well as those on the continuing evolution of the key semantic web language OWL. There are very few articles on the commercial tools available and how they are being deployed and enhanced to deliver business benefit for mainline projects.

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At the 2009 FIATECH conference the Proteus project involving seven companies demonstrated prototypes of interfaces for the Proteus Schema “Dictionary XML” for intelligent P&ID and 3D models. Several of the major design vendors now have production interfaces for either read or write for P&ID and / or 3D models for certain scopes using this Dictionary XML with one pushing forward with part 8 development. Also several EPCs and construction companies are active in deployment mainly using Dictionary XML and some using part 7 / 8 interfaces covering the scope that is possible with those methods today. For these Dictionary XML interfaces all use the Proteus Schema and many also use XMpLant technology in those interfaces. A key factor is that the technology handles all classes including those for 2D graphics and 3D geometry as well as those being proposed to cover annotation, presentation and Symbols / Component definition and instancing. Another major aspect is that of mapping which is not, as many people think, a simple operation but a very complex one. That is because it has to deal with the different structures and internal data references of the various applications which can and do vary between different projects as well as different products. Indeed the XMpLant core tool for managing the ISO15926 objects is very simple, the mapping is very complex for interfaces to any given system where the requirement is to import / export the full information model. As many pilot projects for STEP proved, it is fairly easy to limit the content to ensure that a good demonstration can be made. In the case of STEP for process plant what this also proved, was that it was not commercially viable to turn these interfaces into production scope and quality. This was the reason that ISO15926 came into existence – the recognition that a flexible modelling approach was needed using a standard dictionary of terms – the RDL. From the start of the discussions on this approach to modelling, Templates were considered the way in which to define the constructs of class content where there were simple constructs – Atomic Templates (became part 7) and Molecular Templates – those that can reference other Templates (now Template patterns). The Proteus Schema used these constructs to define the Elements – the classes being those of the RDL. Much of the evolution for ISO15926 has been around the RDL and the major work for the PCA FIATECH IDS-ADI project was centred on this. XMpLant technology has been in use for more than 10 years and over the last two years Noumenon has been developing commercial tools that enable online connectivity to the IDS-ADI RDS WIP as well as the new JORD facility. These tools can be used stand alone but

The focus of the commercial development is the use of ISO15926 to meet the business needs of companies today, as well as tomorrow, using solid tools, leveraging the R&D work underway in the various projects and at the same time making the tools engineer friendly. The R&D activities are focussed on the emerging technology to deploy part 7 and part8.

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are also used directly by XMpLant so that the emerging forms for part 8 and others can be handled directly. This enables interfaces to / from native systems to be DC XML (as now) or as part 8 OWL / RDF XML (currently limited only by Template definitions in public reference data). It also enables XMpLant to be used as a tool to map between these and any other form of transport. A new FIATECH project that was started late in 2012 and officially approved in March 2013 “ISO 15926 Information Models and Proteus Mappings. The objective of this project is to document the ISO 15926 information models for Process and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs) and 3D models in terms of ISO 15926 classes and templates. This project will map the Proteus Schema Elements to the Templates enabling interoperability between Proteus Schema compliant XML (Dictionary Compliant) and part 8 RDF / OWL XML deployments. This will enable the transparent access to intelligent design information during construction and for O&M systems using either transport mechanism both today and in the future. As with any standard, its success depends on its deployment from which business benefit can be derived and to be as invisible as possible to those using it. The objective of XMpLant technology is just that – there are many companies gaining business benefit today who will continue to do so unaware of the evolution of the standard itself. There are read interfaces for AP P&ID and 3D, PDS P&ID and 3D, PDMS, SP P&ID and a recent development for SP3D. Noumenon has been focussed from the early days (1999) in developing core commercial tools to facilitate the development of ISO15926 interfaces for all levels of implementation and XMpLant has been deployed on over 100 major projects to date.

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