SmartPlant Fusion: Technology and Capabilities

Transcription

1 W H I T E P A P E R SmartPlant Fusion: Technology and Capabilities The Fastest and Smartest Way to Make Documents and Drawings Available for Decision Support

2 Contents 1. Introduction SmartPlant Fusion Overview Visualization SmartPlant Fusion Web Portal Thumbnail Viewing Reporting Organization SmartPlant Fusion Product Components SmartPlant Fusion Server Core Information Processing Components Document Discovery Resolve Duplicates Content Discovery Readers Document Reader Drawing Reader Image Reader D Model Reader LaserScan Reader Evolution to Fully Managed Environment The Path Forward i

3 1. Introduction SmartPlant Fusion has been developed by Intergraph to rapidly capture, organize, and make large volumes of previously unstructured information available through a simple web portal interface in a highly organized and intuitive manner. The types of unstructured information include documents, drawings, lists and sheets, 3D models, and even laser scan images and high-resolution photography. This information asset is a vital but often undervalued representation of a plant or project. Usually with limited engineering, administrative, and IT personnel on a plant site, organizing and keeping track of this information can be a significant challenge, particularly when the plant is subject to continual updates, revamps, turnarounds, and maintenance changes. Even new greenfield construction projects suffer from handling large volumes of unstructured information; unstructured information regularly arrives from suppliers, vendors, and engineering partners. During the handover process, if unstructured information is not properly handled, these valuable records can quickly degrade or be lost forever. This white paper will describe Intergraph SmartPlant Fusion and its technologies and capabilities that are available to help owner operators and engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) companies to extract value from unstructured data and documents in a simple and cost-effective manner. 1

4 2. SmartPlant Fusion Overview Fusion cuisine has become known for taking the very best elements of traditional and modern culinary techniques from around the world, and blending them into wholly new and exciting forms that could not have been conceived before. The same is true with SmartPlant Fusion. The combination and integration of many organizational and visualization technologies (as described in the white paper, New Approaches to Make Plant and Project Information Rapidly Available) brings about a bold new way to make information rapidly available, enabling you to find what you need by what you know. 2.1 Visualization It is often said that a data warehouse can be a single source of truth. However, on many plants, there are many such sources of truth. Many of these sources can be invisible or inaccessible at times when knowledge is most needed. Instead, a single point of access to the truth, a portal onto these information sources, can be vital. This enables the user to browse, navigate, discover, and visualize critical facts to support operational decisions SmartPlant Fusion Web Portal The SmartPlant Fusion Web Portal is designed to support a large, often distributed user community, who wants access to all of the plant information from a simple Internet browser, typically with no specialpurpose software installed on their computers or mobile devices. Now, not only can users quickly find everything they need by exploiting the inherent connectedness of the information established by SmartPlant Fusion, but they can also contrast and compare the information sources together. In Figure 1, the user has navigated around the connected plant information (in the Discover and Review panels on the left side of the screen), searching for a specific pump tag number, 1409-P-221. At a single glance, the user is able to see all of the related and contextually important information: technical service manual, nozzle information, drawings, datasheets, P&IDs, safety, purchasing and maintenance data, and so on. With no more than a point-and-click, the user is now visualizing a P&ID (in the lower right of Figure 1), the schematic representation of P (which is found by using an alternate format), and is comparing it against the actual physical configuration on the plant as represented by a 3D, high- 2

5 resolution laser scan image (in the upper right of Figure 1). This latter 3D view can be rotated, explored, and even measured as it represents the true full-scale and remote physical plant. Figure 1: The SmartPlant Fusion Web Portal provides navigation around an interconnected information source. This web portal visualization presents many remote planning, design, and safety application opportunities for distributed users, such that they are not exposed to hazardous areas, or where they do not have the time or budget to travel to facility sites which is an especially important consideration with offshore platforms. The View web part of the SmartPlant Fusion Web Portal is designed to support multiple information types. By default, the native documents, drawings, and images captured by the Document Reader, Drawings Reader, and Image Reader (as described in Section 3) will automatically be rendered to neutral, source file generic formats (e.g. PDF, CSF, etc.) that are ideal for secure file sharing and viewing. For navigation of native files such as AutoCAD and MicroStation, SmartPlant Fusion uses the capabilities of an integrated SmartPlant Markup viewer. This removes the need to install the native CAD tools on the desktop. For laser scan images, a TruView plug-in delivered with the Laser Scan Reader (as described in Section 2.1.2) is utilized by the viewer web part. Companies that have 3D models can even use SmartPlant Interop Publisher to prepare 3D files for viewing by the 3D Reader Thumbnail Viewing When documents are collected from multiple drives, directories, and folder structures, invariably many revisions and duplicates will be discovered. In such cases, engineering judgment is required to determine which document best represents the as-is state of the facility. SmartPlant Fusion assists in this effort by providing quick-view thumbnails of each duplicated file. In many cases, an engineer will be able to eliminate some of the duplicates as candidates for best master simply by glancing at the thumbnail. The user can quickly set the document status to historical to narrow the number of potential candidates. 3

6 Figure 2: The SmartPlant Fusion Browse Duplicates feature allows rapid browsing and sorting of large volumes of documents. Once the obviously outdated documents have been eliminated as candidates for master, SmartPlant Fusion provides a tool (highlighted in section of this document) for detailed side-by-side or overlay comparison of documents to help you identify the master document or drawing Reporting SmartPlant Fusion includes a Business Intelligence module that can be used to develop a wide variety of graphical reports with full drill-down capabilities. In addition, a number of standard reports are included, including tag and document lists and cross references, various status reports to help you track the processing of documents through the system, and more. Figure 3 The Business Intelligence module provides many graphical reporting options. 4

7 2.2 Organization How does SmartPlant Fusion make this information quickly accessible? First, the information locations on the network are identified to SmartPlant Fusion, the file systems, and folder structure. Then, the plant and information types are described to SmartPlant Fusion via a simple intuitive interface, such as nomenclature for the plant breakdown structure (PBS), specific types of file formats you want to process, or any characteristics of filenames that may identify classification or indexing you wish to capture. Armed with this knowledge, SmartPlant Fusion uses Document Discovery Tasks to crawl those locations, continuously recognizing and capturing new files as they are added. As such, this is not a one-time bulk-loading event, nor is it a manual document check-in event. Instead, it is a continuous process of automatically capturing the information as and when it is created or deposited in SmartPlant Fusion watched folders. SmartPlant Fusion secures the files in-situ to ensure that they are not accidentally deleted or modified without control. It then begins a process of reading the files, extracting all of the useful naming, indexing, and content within them to make the information set structured, searchable, and navigable. For example, it fuses together the relationships between tag names and the documents/drawings on which they occur; and similarly between the tag names and their physical locations in 3D models or laser scan images. The tag names of the engineered assets are a key linkage to this organized engineering information. They are the cross-references that allow someone to quickly find what they need by what they know. These links, cross-references, and hotspots on drawings quickly help a user find all related information necessary for a task. They are also important for change management and change impact analysis, such as identifying what else is impacted when a change is made. It is important that this creation, extraction, and linking process is automatic and not manual. Many systems today are adept at allowing the user to create linkages between information. However, Intergraph has found that if you leave the linking to a manual process, it may either get forgotten or linked incorrectly. This task is performed by readers in SmartPlant Fusion as illustrated in Figure 3. Figure 4: SmartPlant Fusion organizes islands of information to make them intuitively navigable. 5

8 3. SmartPlant Fusion Product Components SmartPlant Fusion is designed to take on your information as-is : as it exists today without any costly upgrading, redrawing, manual indexing, or correction exercises. As such, time-consuming information quality assessment and data modeling exercises are typically not needed. SmartPlant Fusion is designed for rapid deployment, configuration, and data capture. After installation of the system and with some simple configuration, SmartPlant Fusion can capture documents almost immediately. Configuration and roll-out can happen in weeks, compared to months for traditional engineering data warehouse (EDW) deployments. Intergraph can help with the initial configuration, but the configuration is such that a business administrator, not a system administrator, should be able to quickly take over and manage ongoing capture. SmartPlant Fusion includes a web portal for viewing the captured information, as well as an Administration module for configuration of the server and its information processing components: Document Discovery, Resolve Duplicates, and Content Discovery. In addition, there are readers for documents, drawings, images, 3D models, and 3D laser scan images. 3.1 SmartPlant Fusion Server SmartPlant Fusion is a server side application with outlying end-user interfaces for visualization and information interaction, delivered either as a desktop client or a web portal. The server application utilizes an RDBMS (SQLServer or Oracle) for metadata and object-relationship storage, vaults (file locations) for file storage, and a web server for web portal execution and presentation. It also creates and manages the plant and document objects and their cross-references (relationships) between them. The SmartPlant Fusion server also executes a number of server processes, such as workflow for the execution of the various readers, full-text retrieval (FTR) for the indexing of text found within the documents themselves, and SmartPlant Markup for the extraction of tag numbers from vector file formats. 3.2 Core Information Processing Components This section highlights the core information processing components of SmartPlant Fusion: Document Discovery, Resolve Duplicates, Content Discovery, and Document Readers. They have the functionalities that enable users to capture a wide spectrum of information types, sources, and quality Document Discovery First, you teach SmartPlant Fusion where to look for documents and how to extract available information about the document type and classifications from folder and file naming conventions. SmartPlant Fusion then repeatedly crawls these file locations, searching for new or updated files. It uses Document Discovery Patterns to select and extract documents into predefined folder structures in SmartPlant Fusion. It also creates a document index, allowing the documents to be searched by name or tag/equipment number. Document Discovery Tasks are then used to analyze and identify documents, drawings, images, 3D models, and laser scans distributed throughout the folder and directory structures of a system. The original folder and file naming structure can provide clues as to the Plant Breakdown Structure and document classification, but cannot show the inter-relationships and inter-dependencies of the content. The document discovery tasks establish file structures and produce thumbnails that can be viewed to identify the content. Many different document formats can be extracted, such as Microsoft Office, 6

9 AutoCAD, MicroStation, PDF files, images, and so on. These files represent the various classes of documents, such as P&IDs, Line Lists, Equipment Lists, Contracts, Purchase Orders, Specifications, Spares Lists, and so on. Figure 5 Screen showing the setup of Document Discovery Patterns. Deliverable: A document index where all of the locations have been searched and files have document records created, allowing the documents to be searched by name. All captured files for the document are stored as versions attached to a document master record at this stage no attempt is made to ascertain the latest or approved versions yet since that cannot be assumed by last in wins. The files captured remain in-situ as a vault. A further role of the document discovery process is to create an alternate rendition, which is a PDF of each file to provide a default format for visualization in the Web Portal. Value: A rapid and continuous data acquisition of all unstructured source information Resolve Duplicates When information comes from multiple sources, or when it isn t clear from naming conventions which is the master version, engineering judgment is required to determine which document best represents the as-is state of the facility. SmartPlant Fusion provides tools for side-by-side or overlay comparison of documents to help you identify the master document or drawing. The Compare Duplicates function is an interactive user interface for identifying the master document/ drawing that will be used going forward. Documents from the SmartPlant Fusion document discovery phase now reside in a document index. It is not unusual to find multiple duplicate documents that have been identified and captured from different directories. These may have been a result of uncoordinated plant changes, end-user copies, or multiple documents of the same item being received from a vendor it is not unusual for companies to request and receive multiple copies for standard equipment items. As a result, the document metadata may be otherwise indistinguishable from each other. A user interface to these duplicates is presented to allow the operator to view and then select the preferred or master revision of the document to proceed into the next phase of processing. 7

10 Figure 6 SmartPlant Fusion's Side-by-Side Comparison assists in duplicate resolution. Deliverable: A document index where a master is selected to be the as-is or latest state of the data. Value: A document index where the assessed as-is revision of the document is searchable and ready for processing Content Discovery With a master identified by the resolve duplicates for each document record, the process continues with the various readers extracting cross-reference and linkage information contained within each document. Based on the type of file attached to the document, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, or PDF text, the documents are routed to automated workflow processes for subsequent analysis. The Content Discovery Task is a core component that works in the background during the extract data phase. Using pattern matching to identify the tag data held in the text, it writes the meta-data, crossreferences, relationships, tag numbers, item names and configurable IDs into the SmartPlant Fusion database. It also applies aliasing business rules for alternate representations of document tag numbers, so that the system can be set up to record different file tag layouts as being the same. For example, 77-PA-101 is recorded as being the same as 77/PA/101. This results in a structured representation of all of the unstructured information in the database; now interconnected, cross-linked, and referenced for rapid searching and investigation. Deliverable: Each of the documents in the document index now has a native, rendered, and viewable file attached, as well as an XML file containing all of the automatically acquired tags and cross-references ready for the Index Writer. Value: The content of the document has been read and interpreted automatically. 8

11 3.3 Readers SmartPlant Fusion employs the use of dedicated Readers for processing drawings, images, and laser scans. Each reader supports multiple file formats so there is no need for individual readers for every single file format. For example, the drawing reader supports AutoCAD, MicroStation, Intergraph IGR, and PID formats Document Reader The document reader extracts cross-referenced and linked information contained in documents. The Intergraph SmartPlant Markup application is used to automatically extract the tag and cross-reference information out of the document file, using a set of tag patterns defined in the administration module Drawing Reader The drawing reader extracts cross-referenced and linked information contained in the drawing. Each of the drawing images now has a native and rendered image attached, as well as an XML file containing all the acquired tags and cross references. These are ready for loading to an automated workflow process, based on the type of file attached to the drawing. The Intergraph SmartSketch RAD hotspotter is used to automatically extract the tag and cross-reference information out of the drawing file Image Reader The image reader extracts the information contained within any images using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine. Images are routed to an automated workflow process for subsequent analysis. A third-party OCR engine, such as ABBYY or AdLib, can be used to extract the tag and other linkage information from the scanned file using a defined set of rules and patterns. What is OCR? It has been available for a number of years. Primarily associated with the image/fax/document scanning industry, OCR has been designed to recognize numbers and text characters from raster (pixel-based) images, and turn them into computer-sensible/readable text. Of course, OCR has become more sophisticated over recent years. Not only has its recognition accuracy increased to upwards of 95 percent or higher, but many vendors provide utilities to search for patterns and structure inside the raster image. For example, search in the bottom right-hand corner of a drawing and extract title-block information, or search for a block that contains a phrase such as contract number, and then look for a pattern in the proximity of it, which could be the actual contract number to extract D Model Reader The 3D reader is designed to load 3D models generated from Intergraph s SmartPlant Interop application. Both the visual file and the tag data are extracted from applications such as PDMS or PDS and placed in directories to be picked up by the 3D Reader, The 3D reader validates the tags and checks for master or alias tag patterns and then creates and cross-references these to the documents. 9

12 3.3.5 LaserScan Reader The LaserScan reader captures Leica TruView HDS information created from scans taken of a plant. These TruViews are made navigable by allowing the user to place tagged hotspots on plant items of interest. These tagged hotspots are named and read by SmartPlant Fusion, and correlated against all of the other information items that are associated with that tagged hotspot. A user can search for a tag and see it in the TruView image, as well as search for all other documents and drawings that contain the same tag. Photo realistic comparison can be done between the current condition of the plant and the first installation (as-captured design basis), providing a streamed 3D CAD representation of a plant, which is mated with the information inside the SmartPlant Fusion database. Figure 7 TruView laser scan hot-spotted with tag locations. 10

13 4. Evolution to Fully Managed Environment SmartPlant Fusion is the fastest way to gain control of your unstructured information. It deploys quickly, enabling you to build relationships, extract intelligence, and apply structure to your unstructured documents and drawings. Of course, once organized, there will be many organizations that will wish to stay with SmartPlant Fusion as their document-centric information portal of choice. However, others may want a path toward an integrated and data-centric approach that leverages all of the tools and applications that Intergraph has been developing for the entire plant life cycle. SmartPlant Fusion provides interoperability with our SmartPlant Enterprise solutions for EPCs and owner operators. You can incrementally promote documents with their related tags into a fully managed environment, including integrated tools, automated work processes, check-in/check-out, electronic sign-off, transmittals, management of change, and much more. In this combined environment, information can be navigated as a seamless whole the information of unknown quality that has been captured via SmartPlant Fusion, together with the high-quality information in SPE/SPO in a single hybrid environment. This allows the information captured by SmartPlant Fusion to be leveraged, and gradually moved forward and enhanced at a measured pace. 11

14 5. The Path Forward The dirty secret about unstructured information is that this issue has existed as long as there have been computers. Arguably, technology exacerbated a problem that has been around a lot longer in the paper world. The answer may not be more rigor in your existing document management system, or an extension of your ERP or CMMS. Many companies have such systems already, and the issue still persists. The real solution is to recognize that legacy information, which is often uncontrolled and unstructured, will always exist in organizations. The ability to react to business situations, like those outlined in this white paper and others, will be constrained by how well you deal with it. This white paper is the third in a three-part series. To find out about the latest approaches and technologies that are being applied to the management of unstructured information, please also read: Understanding Information Challenges for Brownfield Assets and Greenfield Projects Unstructured information continues to expose operations and engineering companies to unnecessary cost, risk, delay, and hazard. This white paper highlights the challenges in collating, organizing, and accessing unstructured information, particularly in brownfield plants, offshore facilities, and greenfield construction projects. New Approaches to Make Plant and Project Information Rapidly Available This white paper discusses a variety of new capabilities that are being made available by Intergraph and Leica Geosystems to enhance existing on-plant operation systems. 12

15 For more information about Intergraph, visit our Web site at Intergraph Corporation. All rights reserved. Intergraph is part of Hexagon. Intergraph, the Intergraph logo, SmartPlant, SmartSketch, and PDS are registered trademarks of Intergraph Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and in other countries. Other brands and product names are trademarks of their respective owners. Intergraph believes that the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. Such information is subject to change without notice. Intergraph is not responsible for inadvertent errors. 5/14 PPM-US-0182B-ENG