Pimansoft.com: data mining and validation

Global Business Environment
for desalination and water treatment projects

3. Data mining and validation

Data mining is a main component of GBE business intelligence with precisely defined scope and tasks. It covers the following points.

inference of good engineering practice rules (GEP)
engineering risk assessment
ranking of products and participants
project metrics reporting

GEP scope is decisions made by a designer regarding the P&ID items selection and linking into functional groups. GBE generates, for instance, material usage and compatibility chart for different fluids and pressures, equipment selection metrics.
Engineering risk assessment refers to non-typical solutions or new products on the market and boils down to detecting of P&ID item specifications that deviate from established standards and procedures. Risk assessment mechanism is intended to catch the situations like the one described below.
In a large desalination project the novel design of the flap valve for dual media filter was suggested. In making decision to go with this design, the project manager overlooked 2 important points.

The company engineers were not unanimous about the valve workability.
The order was awarded to the company having no experience in design, manufacturing and servicing of such kind of valves.

Worst-case scenario surfaced - the plant construction was paralyzed for nearly a month before commissioning: defective valves were re-designed and repaired. Total cost overruns (indirect, material and labor, lost opportunity) were about US$ 4.5 million.
Ranking of equipment and manufacturers is based on the past experience and is a starting point for such routine tasks as bidder selection and bid evaluation. It heavily relies on the procurement metrics.
GBE tracks activities of designers and reviewers and defines the level of their involvement in the specific project disciplines. The person history lies at the basis of the GBE algorithms managing document life cycles and auto-naming of the project resources during its scheduling.
GBE performs on daily basis the project deep scanning - data auditing and metrics generation. Auditing is based on pre-built GEP library and currently includes over 65 tasks. For instance, it checks P&ID item links (integrity validation), design goodness, fluid and construction material compatibility, information consistency and match to the project stage (engineering, detail design, etc).
Extensive metrics (ranging from equipment pieces on order to number of revisions done to work hours spent) gives instant project picture and the progress done.
GBE also tracks the vendor documentation submittals - crucial task beyond human capabilities. For instance, the required documentation pack for the large-capacity pumps reaches 36 items.
GBE instantly generates more than 50 report types in HTML and Excel formats containing not only filtered and sorted user input but also the derived information. For instance, the pump and motor report includes the design power calculation. The project current status is reflected in the outstanding issues report, the working hours report, the P&ID statuses and others.