Overview

Researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies predict that by 2025 water will be the most grave resource problem in the global economy. By uswaternews.com in the last 25 years water utilities usually topped the list of the best performing industry groups in the U.S. stock market on a total return basis.

Piman is an Engineering Information Management System (EIMS) for all phases of the water treatment project life cycle – plant engineering, detailed design, procurement, construction and maintenance.

• It is an expert system formalizing the implicit knowledge and expertise of the water treatment projects engineering and setting out its automation principles and standards.
• It is a powerful navigator leading an engineer through the intricacies of the project development and making all activities transparent to all the participants.
• It is a friendly and truly intelligent environment without learning curve, creating an illusion of simplicity in the face of essential complexity.
• It is internet-centered and shares all the advantages of industrial- strength applications - scalability, client authentication and authorization, data backup and protection, and multiple client concurrent operation.
• It is suitable for a single desktop computer or a global network of 10,000 employees.
• It can run on any platform, has a small footprint and doesn’t require any administration.
• It is usable "out of box" without any customization. Piman performance is optimized for speed and low memory requirements.

Standard EIMS features

Single data repository lies beneath the popular notion of a Single Point Of Entry (SPOE) into the project. It means concurrent uploading, downloading, viewing and modifying the same version of the document - schedule, specification, budget proposal or drawing - from any location. Decision-making processes will be based on reliable and up-to-date information transparent to all the project participants. It gives freedom to concentrate on project engineering rather than waste time on the project data updates management.
The selected data repository model (3-tier server) suits best the collaborative design approach adopted in Piman. Depending on the company size, different database "back-ends" are recommended: H2, Apache Derby RDBMS, IBM DB2 Express-C, OracleX and others.
 
Outstanding issue tracking. The present practice is to discuss the problems at the daily or weekly technical meetings - prioritize and assign the problem to a staff member for analysis, and establish a due date for its resolution. The burden of the problem follow-up is often assigned to the process engineer inundated with hundreds of other problems. So the most frequently used question at the technical discussions becomes "Do you remember.....?" Its close companion is the "...I thought he was doing it..." situations. The result of this practice is straightforward - buildup of forgotten issues, the problem biased prioritization, resolution of the same problems twice, and escalating time losses.
Piman logs and tracks identified problems and ensures that they are corrected. It periodically reports on problem status and process metrics through email alerts, and auto- assigns problems to predefined specialists (e.g. the pump expert). It automatically notifies the assignee of the new assignment and the due date. The issues are viewed in one place and may be easily searched through according to date, status, contents, assignees and results. Such kind of information is a solid basis for trend analysis related to number of problems detected, rate of problem correction, source of the error (e.g., bad process, unclear requirements, poor testing, etc.), and the areas of the design where problems occur most frequently. It helps to adjust priorities and staffing resources, to improve the engineering standards, increase employee accountability with visibility into individual productivity levels.
Unlike its counterparts, in issue tracking Piman goes even further: issues, statistics and metrics may be easily (by a button click) tied to any item of P&ID, any group (supply package, control module or junction box), to the one-line diagram, request for quotation, drawing, or time planner activity. Important to note that this system doesn't require any setup - serious drawback of any stand-alone commercial product - as it is only a thin layer atop the Piman core one.

Document revision and approval. Piman manages P&IDs and specifications revisions and approvals meticulously and with unmatched exactness - every motion is watched and every update is automatically recorded. Depending on the P&ID status Piman may store revisions or immediately email them to the topic subscribers, sort and search them, and delete the old ones. Contrary to the old-fashioned practice, the revision content is separated from the documents - P&IDs, specifications, equipment lists, piping lists, etc... This drastically reduces the information volume transmitted with the revision batch. Move from the revision to item is as simple as a mouse click. Piman sorting revisions to topics is fully automated and further decreases the volume of irrelevant information sent. Very useful feature is a garbage collection - automatic erasure of the outdated revisions from the database. Piman simplifies the most cumbersome tasks in document management: review and approval of documents. It is flexible enough to enable the user to define all requirements of this process and modify them as needed throughout the cycle. He or she can predefine all relevant elements to the review and approval process including individuals involved, formats and deadlines.

Project planning and scheduling. Piman project manager is the last and most important component in the project managing hierarchy incorporating outstanding issue tracking, revision and approval tracking and the project progress and change alerts. Unlike MS Project Manager software, Piman autogenerates the project schedule together with the work loads and allocated resources according to the project preferences. Piman takes advantage of the fact that most project activities are rooted into or may be traced to the P&ID data. It automatically updates the project schedule and the activities metrics and the assignee profile according to the progress done. More information about this ground-braking technology is given in the paper "Project scheduling: out of stall".

Project engineering specifics

Smart tag management. Every piece of equipment, piping or instrumentation on P&ID has its own identification tag. Management of the item tags in all P&ID, lists, and equipment specifications is the most tedious, error- prone and time-consuming part of the project engineering. It's a real nightmare for the process engineer. For P&ID users - the piping engineer, the control engineer, the electrical one - working with P&ID is increasingly difficult and frustrating as it becomes overcrowded with tags and symbols difficult to read and understand. Locating on P&ID the item tag is sometimes like looking for a needle in a hay stack.
Control-related documents - interlock lists, fault/action lists, control loops, cable lists, I/O lists, wiring diagrams - use tags derived from the P&ID item tags. So even the minor tag update may trigger snowfall crashing the project timetable.
Piman combats this problem in two directions: through tag autogeneration and generation of all engineering information - reports, lists, order datasheets only on demand. Such generated documents cannot be re-entered into the project database or stored in the project directories.
Piman auto-generates the item tag according to the selected algorithm, reuses it if the item is deleted, reorders and redefines tags according to the designer preferences, navigates the user from tag to item and from item (of the equipment list) to its location on P&ID. It even generates hardcopy of P&ID with the tags only for the selected type of equipment. So a mechanical engineer has the P&ID only with the piping information, the control engineer - its own version with the instrumentation only, the electrical engineer - with the motors indexed and tied up. Fewer tags on P&ID mean more room for information directly related to process and eventually smaller number of the project P&IDs. Users can access P&IDs and item data through internet browser. The user feedback - questions, reviews, proposals - may be directly "emailed" to the P&ID specific item. Piman automatically manages the P&ID drawing tags and the project tree, which may be easily customized. The same is true for the control - related tags (for instrumentation inputs/outputs, interlocks and control loops) and the order pack tags.
Below are the samples demonstrating printing capabilities of Piman. Here the "raw" P&ID image is what you need to prepare before start using Piman. It supports two different styles of the item tag printing: outside of the P&ID bounds (for the densely populated drawings) and the conventional one - when the tag is adjacent to the item.

• Raw P&ID image,
• Decorated P&ID with tags outside,
• Decorated P&ID with tags inside.

Rapid detail design (RDD) methods include P&ID items auto- creation, “copy & paste”, bulk updates and scaling. Auto-creation means auto-sizing and auto-connecting the primary item and the secondary one in a way established by a "good engineering practice (GEP)". By the extensible GEP algorithm library, Piman actually designs parts of P&ID without single direction from the user. For instance, it specifies the suction and discharge piping with drainage valves for pump, sizes motors and variable speed drives (VSD), valves and instrumentation to the best of the good engineering practice and with proper tags. Drain valves - one of the neglected issues - are always "silently" sized and added to the equipment list. User may “copy & paste” equipment unit with all pertinent data, control structures, documents and drawings from one project to another. After that the unit may be filled with another fluid at different pressure and temperature through bulk update. Finally Piman can scale up or down the unit capacity by automatically resizing its equipment.
The above-mentioned GEP libraries are the core of in-built validation procedures checking for fluid and construction materials compatibility, P&ID item links and information sufficiency and integrity. Information sufficiency answers the question: is the item information enough to order it? Exact match of the P&ID items is the objective of the integrity validation. The input data validation is a 3-stage process - the program suggests, the user modifies, the program checks.
The last facet of RDD tools is the preferences system for the project activities and general standards, and the equipment classes. For example, through preferences system different sets of instrumentation are auto-generated depending on the size of the motor and its service. Integrity validation heavily relies on the selected preferences as well.
 
Information hiding and navigation. Information hiding and abstraction are the cornerstones of the Piman philosophy for building Human - Machine Interface (HMI). It is a sharing of decision-making responsibility between a user and a running program. In Piman implementation, information hiding means information queue preordered by the information priority and uncertainty. Information sufficient for decision making is entirely hidden from the user. Piman treats P&ID as major HMI of the project, and considers P&ID information prioritization an important step in the project development.
In practice this approach results in high tolerance of Piman to the P&ID details: any diagrams from very sophisticated to simplified ones may be used. The P&ID drawing samples given in Intro into P&ID are stripped off of all information suitable for computer processing and one-click retrieval. Control links, revision "clouds", item tags, notes, type of valve (butterfly, ball, plug), its normal position - (fail-to-open, fail-to-close, etc...), and the actuator type are not shown on P&ID. It becomes truly non-dimensional and reusable in all projects – the dream of all process engineers. Practice shows that drafting of such simplified P&IDs is faster by a factor of 10.
One can define P&ID as a network of linked symbols denoting some pieces of equipment. In practice linking symbol to contents poses a number of problems. First problem is termed here symbol overriding and is often seen in the projects engineered by a group of companies with different backgrounds and standards for P&ID development. For instance, in one seawater desalination project 7 (!) different symbols for a filter were used in P&IDs submitted by the equipment vendors. Piman allows the same content be connected to different symbols. Therefore it is insensitive to differences in and deficiencies of the international and local standards for the P&ID graphical symbols – ISO14617, IEC 60617, ANSI ASA Y32.11, E 04-202(France), BS 1192, DIN 2429-2 and others.
Second in occurrence problem is symbol overloading when the same symbol is linked to different contents. For instance, the pump symbol (primary equipment) may or may not include the motor (secondary equipment), the same is true for valve and actuator. To solve this problem, Piman uses best practices adopted in industry.
To enforce the P&ID reusability, the following abstractions are introduced by Piman: item aggregation, item stacking, recurring item patterns, item grouping, and phantom items. These facets of information hiding are the basis for effective project navigation and information sorting as different P&ID consumers request different type of information.

Product indentification management. In a nutshell, this is how to link the P&ID item to the product on the market. It is a problem of vague identities.
The major contributor to this problem is the component standardization across the projects and design conditions. For instance the same pump may be applied for a range of flowrates and pressures, which in most cases overlaps the design process conditions in a number of projects. More notorious example is the pressure transmitter. Only 3 types are needed to measure the pressures from 10 kPa to 16 MPa thanks to "onspot" calibration. The necessity and effect of standardization grow with a number of projects done.
The notion of standardized component may stem from standardized design conditions ( the same pressures, flowrates and water quality) or be equivalent to the notion of generic product especially for companies mainly engaged in the assembly of the procured components. The reverse osmosis desalination units are the example of such activity. The generic product may be considered a common denominator of the constantly evolving products A, B, C, D on the market. PIN is a Product Identification iNdex into unique set of stable attributes describing generic product functionality, design and construction. These attributes are major price-formers as well.
PINs are the domain of the procurement personnel. The existing practice of converting the unique set of the item attributes into PIN is to decrease their number to 2-3 basic ones (according to the problem perception by a person) and encoding them with a specific range of numbers. Unfortunately, all this system comes to a halt when a somehow missed attribute is added to a set of the recorded ones. Loosely defined PINs can not be used for building the standard component library and reference list (the company "know-how") and add more working hours to the project timetable, spent on technical comparison of the vendor quotations. These issues are critical to the project development and the plant future operation and maintenance.
Piman uses proprietary self-learning algorithms to auto-generate PINs and to build the standard component library and reference list. This library is part of the data validation mechanism boosting the process engineer productivity. PIN catalog includes the product and OEM catalogs, which may be served as a basis for the future project cost estimates.
In Piman implementation, PIN is an index into a set of documents sent to vendors for product purchasing. As shown in the figure above, this set contains 2 parts differing in nature. First part - general requirement specification - is rather stable and valid for all projects. It sets the activity frame for the second, dynamic part of PIN - P&ID item datasheets and datalists, their samples been given in Reporting capabilities. Piman auto-generates datasheets and auto-matches items to specifications. The specification catalog features the user authentication and authorization, searching and sorting capabilities, spelling checking, revision tracking, maintenance of the reviewer and approver lists, approval tracking, deleted documents rescue, revision posting to subscribers and garbage collection. Piman allows performing the "exact-match" and "partial-match" searches of specifications to leverage on the previous project database and standardization benefits. In Piman, the dynamic project-specific part is customized through the 'Project preferences' menu.
Piman prepares order packages and sends quotation requests to suppliers and tracks the requests progress. The order packs include specifications and datasheets with detail item descriptions and tags, the excel template for the supplier to fill in and return. Piman automatically processes the supplier return form, tracks order execution.

Process tools. Piman comes with a set of unique, water treatment oriented web-running tools: REGRA, MULTIPUMP, and HYPE. REGRA is used for storing in digital and digitized formats the pump performance curves. MULTIPUMP performs pump curve mathematics: adds, subtracts and multiplies the curves, integrates and scales them and finds derivatives. HYPE serves for system hydraulic design and rating (including RO membranes manifolds) , if piping isometrics is known, and report generation. All reports produced by the abovementioned programs are automatically stored in the database and may be easily retrieved. Below are some sample outputs.

• magnetic flow meter datasheet,
• rehardening reactor vessel datasheet,
• instrument hookup drawing.
• piping list.