At the Digital Industrial Facilities Summit, a session of HxGN (aka Hexagon) LIVE Global 2023 in Las Vegas earlier this year, Petronas presented its flagship engineering data management system, a web-based engineering document and data management system for projects and operations. P-EDMS provides access to engineering documents, P&ID and other drawings and 3D models. The system accesses data in SAP, GE APM, AspenTech, Luciad and PI System. Scope covers the complete asset lifecycle for Petronas’ Gas, Upstream and Downstream businesses. P-EDMS was established in 2011 and is now operating at 28 sites with some 4 million engineering documents online and 90 projects executed. A digital backbone connects two P-EDMS flavors, ‘Nested Engineering’ for projects and ‘Insights’ for operations. Nested Engineering provides a project management methodology that ‘nests’ contractor’s and owner’s data environments to facilitate quality and compliance, with continuous consistency checks against the Cfihos standard. The cloud enables ‘open collaboration’ between owner, contractors and suppliers, allowing for a control of data quality during the project. P-EDMS InSights leverages a similar approach during operations as a one stop information center, tracking costs, schedule, equipment health, risk and more, again with Cfihos inside.
Vijay Mali presented work performed by Lamprell Energy on an information management digital twin for Saudi Aramco. Hexagon’s Xalt Solutions business unit assisted on the project. The information management ‘digital twin’ has been built with Odata ‘restful’ APIs around an HxGN SDx* digital twin-cum-database shared between Aramco and Lamprell users. The system underpins Aramco EPCI Projects and Operations and leverages a class library with a ‘Cfihos-compliant’ data structure. Various Power BI dashboards display project progress along with performance, quality, cost and safety KPIs. The system is deployed on the Aramco CRPO 67 Project. ‘Digital data books’ are produced for ‘seamless’ final document handover. The solution also encompasses workers health and safety monitoring using IoT devices including AI video cameras, smart watch/wearables and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) anchors for working at height (scaffold monitoring).
Rodrigo Collombara and Lucas Oliveira (both from Radix Engineering presented their work on the GCGV (Gulf Coast Growth Ventures) new build plastics manufacturing facility at Corpus Christi, TX. The GCGV is an ExxonMobil/SABIC joint venture. Radix has established a digital engineering ecosystem on top of Smart Cloud designed to support ‘evergreen engineering’ by standardizing multiple databases from different contractors. Before the project the system included a mixture of Hexagon and Aveva software of various vintages that was costly and hard to maintain, making handover ‘chaotic’. A risk analysis of the software landscape anticipated a ‘huge amount of losses from software mismatches’. Enter SPI (Smart Plant Instrumentation*), ExxonMobil’s standard tool for capital projects and the opportunity of moving everything to the Smart Cloud. Radix, with help from ExxonMobil, has migrated the system to the HxGN Smart Cloud (Smart3D, Smart P&ID, Smart Instrumentation). Engineering design tools now run in the cloud and information is now accessible by all, ExxonMobil, EPCs and 3rd party contractors. The project has seen Radix developing a toolset and expertise for data clean-up and migration from the Aveva toolset to HxGN Smart3D. Radix sees ‘a lot of mileage’ in the expertise it has developed for the GCGV project.
Comment – so much for standards-enabling ‘best of breed’ software mix and match.
Safari Bin Saad reported progress on Petronas’ bolted flange joint integrity (BFJI) program, as implemented across its upstream and downstream businesses. Hydrocarbon leakage from bolted flange joint is one of the pain points leading to loss of containment and unplanned downtime. The BFJI program is a component of Petronas’ ‘leak-free philosophy’. A central flange database is populated in an automated work process for flange joint tagging and data extraction. Data is extracted from SmartPlant 3D and from AI-processed scans of drawings. Flange joints are ascribed a unique tag number, digitally linked to drawings, QA/QC records and P&ID and isometrics stored in P-EDMS (see above). The system captures static (reference) data on flanges (materials, bolts, gaskets and nominal torque values). Time variant dynamic data is also collected as joints are touched or retightened. Capturing up-to-date tightening and calibration information is key for inspection and reporting. A Petronas torque calculation program also ran.
David Widegren presented CERN’s digital engineering platform. Cern runs the Geneva, Switzerland-located Large Hadron Collider. This has some 100 million components arranged in an underground 17 mile long circular tunnel that accelerates particles to 99.999999% of the speed of light or, if you like, making some 11,000 revolutions/second. Cern is a ‘heavy user’ of HxGN Enterprise Asset Management notably in response to the ‘explosive adoption’ of maintenance checklists. Most of which are generated with the simplified ‘EAM Light’ user interface. EAM Light was developed at CERN but is made open source and is now available to all HxGN EAM users. Cern’s ambition is to create an open community of organizations with similar needs and a ‘willingness to share the common results allowing us all to advance and improve’. ‘If you and your organization are interested in participating, please contact us!’ One EAM deployment involved smart sensors installed on crane motors that communicate maintenance information and energy consumption to EAM via ABB’s IoT cloud. Widegren conclude saying that ‘HxGN EAM has proven to be highly configurable, scalable and open for integration with other systems and processes. EAM will become an even more important cornerstone in our IT landscape as we move forward towards creating digital twins of our installations.’
A Hexagon presentation looked into the future of information management and a new long-term vision of smart digital reality (SDR). SDx is becoming part of the SDR platform running on a new multi-tenant SaaS platform. The current Smart Cloud approach based on ‘Estates’ (sets of Windows Virtual Machines) is not efficient and sustainable in medium term. Hexagon is moving from Windows Servers to a Linux container-based architecture (Kubernetes). Monolithic applications are to be broken down into scalable microservices. All of which implies new internal processes and methodologies such as DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). ‘Operating a container-orchestrated SaaS multi-tenant environment is not simple’. AI is also on the horizon with, notably a ‘Data Smartification’ initiative using ChatGPT to extract metadata from P&ID and other docs. A prototype shows solid performance, especially for document and equipment type and engineering discipline. Extracting document names and revnumber is harder due to PDF formatting gotchas. The system currently follows CFIHOS but ‘any standard can be used’.
View these and other HxGN presentations here.
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