Taking the open standards approach
15 Jan 2000
Led by the offshore sector, the process industries have been establishing open standards under the ISO/STEP and POSC/Caesar initiatives. The latter is the joint standardisation project of the Petrotechnical Open Software Corporation (POSC) and the Norwegian Caesar offshore consortium. The resulting ISO 15926 POSC/Caesar standard provides the structure against which the data can be modelled and the library of terms to be used when defining plant items.
It is the foundation layer for the logical source of accurate and consistent information for use throughout the life cycle, taking away today's problems of data inconsistency. Intergraph's approach has been to work with its customers and the standards bodies, to develop solutions built on these standards. Its Notia solution was the world's first commercially available data warehouse based on the POSC/Caesar standards.
The other vital pre-requisites are a common user interface based on web technology, and industry standards to ensure that there is one environment for access to information from around the world.
In the new data-driven process environment CAD is data in graphical form. Radical changes are taking place in the engineering world. Upgrading CAD systems in isolation to support work processes will no longer be enough in the new millennium. The implementation of new technology will have to correspond to future ways of doing business and not to the old paper-driven concepts.
The traditional concept of CAD as an electronic pencil or automated graphics placement tool that generated documents is no longer valid. With a new data-driven plant environment, 2D and 3D CAD is essentially another view onto the plant data, one that manifests the data in a graphical form.
For example, a group of valves may be shown as a tabular valve list in an Excel spreadsheet, as formatted information on a data sheet, as simple graphical symbols on a piping and instrumentation diagram, or as 3D objects residing in a pipeline in a physical model. In each case what is seen by the user is an alternative representation of the valve data, in a context appropriate for his needs.
