Bilfinger Digital Next: PIDGraph Equipment Isolation: Utilizing P&ID data for safer operations and maintenance

Customer

Industry:	Oil & Gas
Region:	Worldwide
Focus:	Maitenance & Operations

Challenge

Ensuring safe and consistent equipment isolation procedures in an oil and gas process plant throughout entire plant lifecycle.

Solution

An application based on PIDGraph’ s Deep Graph Analysis identifies and summarizes the isolation requirement and provides a simple list to the user which can act as a check-list that supports maintenance personnel in the right execution of equipment isolation.

Benefit

Connect the system isolation requirements to the existing permit to work system
Obtain positive isolation check-list
Automatic generation of bill of material for isolation works

Challenge

Carrying out maintenance tasks and inspection safely is always a challenge in the oil and gas industry. On the one hand, plant operators have to meet several industry guidelines and defined routines to ensure safety during a maintenance process and on the other hand, the time available for completing maintenance in an operating plant is extremely low.

Solution

PIDGraph enables a cost-efficient and fast conversion and update of legacy P&IDs. PIDGraph generates intelligent, semantic P&IDs in graph structure, which are stored in an XML or JSON file (see also our FAQs on PIDGraph). Upon these files, PIDGraph’ s Deep Graph Analysis is applied to identify key items of equipment, mark improper isolation arrangements and check for adequate installations of pressure safety valves. Since the P&ID is stored in a graph structure, alternative modes of plant operation using differing flow routes can be taken into consideration as well. This way, a large number of P&IDs can be harvested to automatically detect areas for required plant design improvements.

Maintenance personnel can access these insights using a web-based application, which minimizes human failures. Incident analysis confirms that human failures cause a large proportion of isolation failures (source: The safe isolation of plant and equipment, HSE UK, 2006).

Example

A pump is to be switched-off and isolated from the process stream for maintenance. PIDGraph allows the user to obtain a list of valves that are required to be closed and a list of spectacle blinds that needs to be reversed to positively isolate the pump from the process streams. This enables the plant operator to use this list as an expert guide and carry out isolation properly and take care of all possible dangers.

PIDGraph equipment isolation application enables maintenance personnel to:

Locate and highlight all power sources relevant to this process. This can even be done cross P&ID due to graph interlinking.
Locate and highlight all critical equipment, which need to be isolated. Either via a blinds or block and bleed isolations – depending on the majority of works that needs to be done.
Use programmable isolation processing depending of isolation scope and plant specifics. User can check each step.
Link the maintenance isolation works with the existing permit to work system.

Benefit

The customer benefits from a very flexible application. PIDGraph algorithmically aids the equipment isolation process and provides a particular bill of material (BOM) for the isolation of each equipment. This BOM can be integrated to the supply chain system in order to make the material available in time, without any human intervention. This helps making maintenance more secure. The check-list generated can also be used as a permissive for maintenance works and feed into the permit-to-work System.
With PIDGraph’s Deep Graph Analysis for equipment isolation, the customer gets a better overview of critical plant items when it comes to equipment isolation. This helped us to achieve a more safe and structured maintenance approach.

Key Customer Benefit

Efficient conversion of old P&IDs into intelligent P&IDs
Improved guidance on execution of isolation tasks
Intuitive provision of equipment isolation insights in a web-based application
Obtain a ready to use check-list which becomes handy and can be utilized as an isolation record
A bill of material for the isolation works can be generated at the planning stage and hence the material availability can be assured for any maintenance
The material requirement for isolation can be automatically connected to the SAP and supply chain system

PIDGraph Equipment Isolation

Use Case: Utilizing digital P&ID data for safer operations and maintenance