Shell’s Anders Thostrup reported on the transition of CFIHOS, the capital facilities information handover standard, to the IOGP. CFIHOS, now in Release 1.4 has seen strong growth in participation. USPI-NL itself is transitioning with a new director (Martin te Lintelo) and new initiatives, notably the Facility Lifecycle 3D Model Standard FL3DMS. USPI is also renewing its relationship with other standards bodies – notably a reactivated ISO 15926 and DEXPI, the P&ID standards body (see below).
Luke Kendall traced the transformation of Norske Shell’s business with the digital twin. The digital twin has three components, human machine interaction (HMI), models and data. The engineering data warehouse is the basis of the DT along with ERP transaction data, permits, status reports and real time process control streams. Data is pushed out to operators and into models. Current work involves bringing the models into the DT for ‘what if’ scenarios, turning on a new well, forecasting the water cut and its effect on operations. Shell is looking to build the DT an early stage in an asset’s life, before steel is cut, perhaps even before FID. The DT will also be the last thing switched-off at decommissioning. Current asset maintenance systems rely on people to integrate across equipment, maintenance and projects. In the future the DT will be the integration platform. One motivation for the increased digitalization is that ‘young blood is not inspired by oil and gas’, digital is perceived as a way of attracting and retaining talent.
The first full DT was built for the Nyhamna gas plant in 2019, requiring Shell to get partner agreement in the face of ‘different levels of interest’ in the DT concept. The Nyhamna DT is coupled with Statnett’s (Norway’s electricity grid operator) own digital twin to reduce or eliminate power dips. Electricity makes up around 50% of Nyhamna’s opcost. The DT now connects the AMS to the ERP, providing notifications on equipment and work orders. Real soon now, real time information will come into the twin and be compared with models running in the background to show issues with power consumption and under-used resources. Though the DT is in its early phase, it has brought ‘amazing achievements’ and Shell is looking to profoundly change its way of working. The upcoming Ormen Lange DT (2020) sees the DT concept extending to the subsea domain. In the Q&A, Kendall revealed that the DT is a collaboration between Shell and Kongsberg Digital, with all the data in the Kognif-AI cloud.
Heiner Temmen (Evonik) and Reiner Meyer Rössl (Autodesk) teamed to present the ongoing ‘DEXPI’ (Data exchange in the process industry) project and its alignment with CFIHOS. The authors consider the P&ID (piping and instrumentation diagram) to be the most important plant document. Dexpi sets out to avoid information loss in data transfer, quite a tall order as a P&ID diagram embeds graphics, lists and structures/topologies. Today, information is transferred as paper, PDF, and Excel, but there is no standard. DEXPI has good support from the vendor community (Siemens, Autodesk, Hexagon, Aveva …). Owner operator support is limited to six members and only one EPC (Air Liquide) is on board. Deliverables to date include a P&ID exchange spec, an extension of the Proteus schema and CAE interfaces. A Dexpi ‘verificator’ has been developed by AixCAPE and a third-party test body has been founded by the owner-operators. Work is in progress on alignment between Dexpi and CFIHOS with the goal of a ‘user friendly end user (engineer) tool independent of Autodesk or other packages’. A Sparql endpoint is available for ‘semantic’ interaction with Dexpi data. More from Dexpi.
In the ensuing Q&A the degree to which Dexpi (and other standards) are ‘baking’ legacy data silos into new digital processes was raised. An informed observer commented that ‘we have never really been able to get away from digitizing paper documents, I would like to but never persuaded anyone to do this’.
Koen Penneman, from Belgian PipeXperts, presented on digital transformation for the smaller engineering company point of view. With parent company Engiplast BVBA, Pipexperts has been conducting laser scanning of petrochemicals and oil and gas facilities since 2004. Today, the company performs P&ID digitization, layouts and has added drones and VR. PipeXperts has teamed with software boutique CEA Engineering to develop ‘Plant4D’, a database for asset data and for ‘1D, 2D or 3D visualization’. Plant4D can ingest a point cloud, create a 3D model and link it the underlying asset. A flagship PipeXpert deployment is the Belgian Prayon chemical plant.
Leo van Ruijven (Croonwolter&dros) outlined a proposed USPI project to deliver an implementation guide for companies starting out on the systems engineering journey. Systems engineering (SE) is defined in ISO 15288. This is a ‘nice’ definition but does not address the problems of one-off designs and of doing SE in the face of ‘fragmentation’, as SE has many owners. SE projects often fail in the early stages and folks need simple guidance, especially on requirements analysis. Enter the READI, the ‘required asset digital lifecycle information JIP’. This addresses issues such as imprecise, complex requirements that defy automation. Simple sentences in requirements may be ambiguous or hard to interpret. READI sets out to break these down into a taxonomy of specifics. Work has started (as ISO 15926 part 11) for requirements mapping/description. The USPI project targets engineers with limited semantics and information management skills. The project has strong backing from Shell. ‘Procurements is good at messing things up. We need an independent requirements structure to be able to reuse successes and stop making the same mistakes again and again’.
More from USPI-NL.
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