Last year we reported on flagging support for CFIHOS, the IOGP’s Capital facilities information handover engineering data standard. A McDermott/Technip presentation at USPI-NL saw ‘no evidence of significant adoption across the client landscape’. In response, CFIHOS rep Peter Townsend stated that IOGP was working on training, awareness and measuring adoption. Judging by the subsequent activity surrounding CFIHOS, Townsend’s efforts appear to be bearing fruit. There are some 80 companies now involved in the initiative which had a well-attended, four day face-to-face meeting chez Eastman in Kingsport, Tennessee.
First, some background. Cfihos, like other industry standards initiatives (business objects, OSDU), originated within Shell. Shell’s Engineering Information Specification (EIS) for plant design and engineering, based on the EPISTLE Handover Guide* developed in the 1990s, was approved as a Shell standard in 2004. EIS was handed over to USPI-NL in 2012 and became CFIHOS. Meanwhile, the EPISTLE work was taken up by the Norwegian POSC/CAESAR Association (PCA) where it became ISO 15926. In 2020 CFIHOS moved from USPI to IOGP under the auspices of IOGP Joint Industry Project (JIP) 36.
* EU Process Industries Data Handover Guide available from POSC-CAESAR.
In our previous reporting we made two observations that are worth re-examining in the light of CFIHOS’ current rejuvenation. First, the early intent of CFIHOS was for a more straightforward approach to information exchange than ISO 15926 with its 14 ‘Parts’ and an ontological/Semantic Web approach. This was considered by some as too complex for the engineering community. CFIHOS was, originally at least, delivered as a suite of Excel spreadsheet templates and instructions for contractors and EPCs to fill-out with their data. Our second observation was that a data ‘standard’ is not the same as a database. The first, whether an Excel template or a data model, needs populating with data. The cost of achieving a full-populated engineering database was the subject of a joint PCA/Fiatech (Fully Integrated and Automated Technologies for Construction - now subsumed into the Construction Industry Institute) ‘joint operations reference data’ (Jord) project which assessed this at some $1.5 billion dollars, spread over a 20 year period. We put the likelihood of this happening as ‘small to vanishing’.
In 2021, two IOGP JIPs (33 Standardizing Procurement and 33 aka CFIHOS) teamed to deliver an ‘Equipment Hub’, intended to ‘bring these two initiatives together in a cloud-based repository for storing and exchanging vendor information associated with the standard equipment. The Equipment Hub leveraged technology from Sharecat Solutions (see next article) and promised to save the ‘millions of dollars annually [that ] are wasted processing, packaging, and transferring associated data through the supply chain on single projects’. The Equipment Hub currently gives a 404, page not found. We pinged the IOGP for a status update to learn that ‘the minimum viable product phase of development has been successful and IOGP is reviewing proposals from external organizations on how best to sustainably manage the project going forwards’. The intent is to focus on JIP33 equipment, but ‘may well have other products and components once commercial’. IOGP stated that the ‘expectation’ is that the Hub ‘will be conformant to the CFIHOS RDL and possibly other RDL used across other industries and platforms’.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, the US Construction Industry Institute, a unit of UT Austin, has not been idle and has come up with its Advanced Work Package, a ‘planned, executable process that encompasses the work on an EPC project, beginning with the initial planning and continuing through detailed design and construction execution’. AWP is said to include input from CFIHOS, Mimosa and ISO. The CII has a significant oil and gas footprint with membership from Chevron, Shell, ExxonMobil. CII presented its ‘Carroll H. Dunn Award’, one of the most presitious (sic) awards of its kind, to Aramco’s Mansour Saad Al-Shehri. The CII recently proposed two research, a ‘Digital Thread and Virtual Construction Model Guideline for Digital Project Delivery’ and ‘Model-based Deliverables for Capital Projects’. Earlier this year, USPI organized an online educational ‘Safari’ on the CII AWP and its data model with presentations from Mikitaka Hayashi (JGC) and Eric Dechoz (Shell). A division of labors was proposed with a plant data element (CFIHOS) managed by IOGP, a 3D Model (FL3DMS) managed by USPI and a planning data standard ISO 19008, managed by ISO.
So where is CFIHOS today? CFIHOS’ scope today is no longer just handover from construction to engineering but it is pitched as more of a lifetime data standard viz. ‘The CFIHOS specification can be used for information handover when commissioning, operating, maintaining or decommissioning any process industry capital facility’. Membership included 81 organizations at the last count, including 14 IOGP owner operators. The latest joiners include Saudi Arabia’s ambitious NEOM new-build town in the desert. CFIHOS recently released a data model viewer , leveraging E/R studio and Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect. From the lates Version 1.5 release notes it is clear that Excel/CSV files, along with their awkwardness, are still central to CFIHOS data exchange.
Which may be why there is a push from the POSC/Caesar organization and others to re-inject some semantics into the standard. There were high fives all round on LinkedIn when PCA announced that its Industrial Data Ontology (IDO) has been published. IDO is billed as a replacement for the semantic ISO 15926-Part 14 and as a ‘top-level ontology’ for PCA’s reference data library (RDL). All of which might seem rather obscure if it was not for the fact that the IDO got an enthusiastic plug at the recent CFIHOS meet. TotalEnergies’ Jean-Charles Leclerc explained, ‘[the IDO] reflects CFIHOS members’ high level of interest for the semantic modeling shown at the JIP36 2023´s face to face in Tennessee. We are currently developing a detailed value proposal for a semantic CFIHOS’.
Comment: Equipment, construction, handover and the like are, in general, managed in commercial software packages such as those from Aveva and Hexagon. Both companies and much of their user base ‘support’ and or claim ‘compliance’ with one or more of the standards described here. Which one will come out on top? There is a lot of interchange between the different standards bodies – CII, IOGP/CFIHOS, PCA and ISO. But the various industries – chemical, petroleum (upstream/downstream), construction at large – may have different cultures and be driven by other standards initiatives. Finally there is the difference between a data model and a database. In other words, is the standard an empty shell or a fully populated with quality data. Whereas owner operators may consider equipment data as ‘commodity’ to be freely shared in a ‘hub’, equipment manufacturers, who strive to differentiate their hardware and invest a lot in creating and maintaining the associated data, may think differently. A final stumbling block is the division of labor within the major oils who drive the standardization efforts. Data managers and IT folks may get excited about information exchange standards but their colleagues in engineering and procurement may be more pragmatical and more into ‘buy’ than ‘build’.
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