Building Intelligent P&IDs in an Open Digital Ecosystem

Keywords:  Open Digital Ecosystem, Intelligent P&IDs, Regulatory Compliance, DEXPI

Overview

Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs) are crucial for understanding facility operations, identifying safety hazards, and troubleshooting maintenance issues in the process industry. Intelligent P&IDs (iP&IDs) integrate traditional diagrams with databases, ensuring real-time synchronization of visual representations and underlying data, enhancing error checking, reporting, and analytics capabilities. Intelligent P&IDs represent a key step in transforming from document management to data management and are therefore a key enabler of digital transformation.

While accurate P&IDs are important for regulatory compliance, the maintenance of intelligent P&IDs is challenging due to the lack of interoperability between different engineering design software, often leading to data loss and reduced functionality when converting formats. The ARC Open Asset Digital Twin Working Group and several other industry groups are working to help P&IDs thrive in an open ecosystem. Key findings in this report:

• The DEXPI association is working on standardizing P&ID data formats using XML to improve interoperability, reduce manual effort, and enhance collaboration across different engineering tools.
• Separate the authoring tools from the data to fully leverage the value of iP&IDs and ensure compatibility across various software platforms.
• Adopting neutral file formats to enable higher value creation and allow EPCs to focus on high-value engineering work without being tied to specific software vendors.

The Challenge in Maintaining Intelligent P&IDs

Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs) are one of the most familiar sets of engineering detailed drawings used extensively in the process industry. They act as a blueprint for how a facility operates and are required to be maintained and updated with current plant information and changes. Operators understand the process flow and how to operate the equipment to help identify potential safety hazards and ensure the process is operating safely. These are vital for maintenance crews to troubleshoot problems and repair equipment. While in the most basic form, these contain a library of standard symbols often produced in basic drafting tools. Capital project teams will produce these during detailed design using intelligent software and then turn these over to operating teams with limited ability to leverage any data.

Intelligent P&IDs (iP&IDs), also sometimes called smart P&IDs, are an advanced version of traditional Diagrams. They combine the visual aspects of a P&ID with the power of a database. What sets them apart is a dynamic connection to a database that stores detailed information about each element in the diagram. This data can include things like equipment specifications, valve tags, instrument details, and material properties. Changes made to the graphical symbols in the iP&IDs are automatically reflected in the linked database, and vice versa. This ensures both the visual representation, and the underlying data are always coordinated. iP&ID software can automatically generate reports (valve lists, line lists), check for inconsistencies, and even support advanced simulations or diverse analyses.

Several regulations mandate the creation and maintenance of Process Safety Information (PSI). P&IDs are considered a fundamental part of PSI documentation. By ensuring P&IDs are up-to-date and accurate, facilities can demonstrate compliance with these regulations. Examples are OSHA 19.10, Process Safety.

The maintenance of Intelligent P&IDs is a challenging and often costly process. Most asset owners endeavor to maintain Intelligent P&IDs, however these are often delivered in multiple file formats from different engineering design software packages. There has been no clear path for data to be interoperable between major engineering design software platforms. EPCs are creating an intelligent P&ID using one vendor package. There is no method of converting one file format to another Intelligent P&ID and another platform without significant cost and manual effort. In many cases, EPCs will provide iP&IDs to owner-operators; and to comply with internal standards and record keeping, intelligent P&IDs are “dumbed down,” losing fidelity and the richness of data originally built, in many cases reducing intelligent P&Ds to PDF documents. 

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