Speaking at a keynote session at the DaratechPLANT2008 conference last month in Houston, Bentley CEO Greg Bentley identified key market trends in process plant creation and provided an update on Bentley’s technology. Bentley claimed that all owner-operators and engineering/procurement/construction (EPC) firms at daratechPLANT2008 use Bentley software with, on average, over 20 Bentley sites per firm.
BP
To manage project information across these distributed enterprises many design firms now use Bentley’s ProjectWise collaboration servers. Bentley poster child BP has now implemented its ten major capital projects across three continents using ProjectWise’s lifecycle plant engineering data management.
Modular
EPC workflows increasingly incorporate modular solutions, leveraging suppliers’ innovations. This means that suppliers are assuming more of the engineering and construction work as they design, configure, fabricate and just-in-time deliver modules of greater functional scope and scale for assembly on site.
ISO 15926
Bentley supports this distributed engineering activity with bidirectional exchange of virtual work packages. Here, interoperability is the key but the days of ‘command and control’ plant creation and a ‘monolithic’ project software environment are gone. These have been replaced by a ‘uniquely robust’ plant data model, the ISO 15926 standard for the representation of process plant lifecycle data.
Fortuitous
Though originally conceived to support data management over the decades of a plant’s lifetime, ISO 15926 fortuitously also solves the formidable challenges of distributed plant creation. Today’s services-oriented architectures also take full advantage of self-describing data, the hallmark of ISO 15926.
OpenPlant
Bentley originally used ISO 15926 to import plant data created in design systems from other vendors. But now the standard supports real-time interoperability between plant applications, including new acquisitions within Bentley’s growing application portfolio. The ‘culmination’ of Bentley’s ISO 15926 work is OpenPlant, suite of applications that store data in the ISO 15926 data model.
ELS
Also at Daratech, Bentley announced that Norwegian design consultants NLI Engineering Oil & Gas and Gazprom unit TyumenNIIgiprogas have signed up to its Enterprise License Subscription (ELS) program. ELS gives companies unlimited access to the entire Bentley software portfolio for a fixed annual fee. More from www.bentley.com/openplant.
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