Machine-interpretable Engineering Design Standards for Valve Specification
This work addresses the need for digital standards in engineering design, particularly for valve selection, though it is incremental as it builds on existing ontologies and methods.
The paper tackled the problem of digitizing engineering design standards by transforming them into machine-interpretable ontologies, enabling automated validation of valve specifications with compliance checks against industry standards.
Engineering design processes use technical specifications and must comply with standards. Product specifications, product type data sheets, and design standards are still mainly document-centric despite the ambition to digitalize industrial work. In this paper, we demonstrate how to transform information held in engineering design standards into modular, reusable, machine-interpretable ontologies and use the ontologies in quality assurance of the plant design and equipment selection process. We use modelling patterns to create modular ontologies for knowledge captured in the text and in frequently referenced tables in International Standards for piping, material and valve design. These modules are exchangeable, as stored in a W3C compliant format, and interoperable as they are aligned with the top-level ontology ISO DIS 23726-3: Industrial Data Ontology (IDO). We test these ontologies, created based on international material and piping standards and industry norms, on a valve selection process. Valves are instantiated in semantic asset models as individuals along with a semantic representation of the environmental condition at their location on the asset. We create "functional location tags" as OWL individuals that become instances of OWL class Valve Data Sheet (VDS) specified valves. Similarly we create instances of manufacturer product type. Our approach enables automated validation that a specific VDS is compliant with relevant industry standards. Using semantic reasoning and executable design rules, we also determine whether the product type meets the valve specification. Creation of shared, reusable IDO-based modular ontologies for design standards enables semantic reasoning to be applied to equipment selection processes and demonstrates the potential of this approach for Standards Bodies wanting to transition to digitized Smart Standards.