All developed nations invest a substantial portion of their gross domestic product in capital facilities – their planning, design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation and decommissioning. There is increasing pressure on the global capital facilities industry to perform more efficiently. Since the late 1990s, a number of studies have addressed this issue and provided analyses and recommendations. In a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) looking at the US for the year 2002, an estimated $15.8 billion were lost due to inadequate handling and handover of project data and information (E5-3).
The Capital Facilities Information Handover Guide (CFIHG) was designed to address this problem area in two parts. This report covers only Part 1 of the Guide as Part 2 was never completed by Fiatech.
Part 1 of the guide, presented here, defines a methodology for defining the information requirements for the full facility life cycle and then developing and implementing an information handover plan for a specific capital facility project.
These are the major steps:
- Establish an overall facility life cycle information strategy.
- Determine the business requirements for information to be handed over at each life cycle.
- Develop a handover plan, which forms part of the overall project information plan.
- Implement the handover.
Part 2 of the guide was proposed but never produced. It was intended to describe case studies, specific standards, and data forms applicable to different capital facility types (e.g., general building, process plant, and transportation infrastructure) (E5-3).
In preparing Part 1 of the Guide the following related studies to this initiative were completed:
- A study on ways of advancing the use of innovative technologies, processes, and systems to help building owners and managers improve the effectiveness and efficiency of building operations and maintenance by enabling intelligent, self-maintaining and repairing operational facilities. Maintenance activities at nuclear power plants are planned to an exceptional level of detail to protect the health of plant workers and to ensure the plant is maintained safely. For nuclear plants to meet “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” (ALARA) compliance, detailed surveys of work environments must be conducted to identify potential areas of high radioactivity. Maintenance planners then use this information to determine how a specific task can be performed to minimize exposure (E5-1).
- Another study was done that discusses the 2004 Construction Users Roundtable (CURT) report, “Collaboration, Integrated Information and the Project Life Cycle in Building Design, Construction and Operation (WP-1202)”, making clear there is a compelling need to improve project delivery due to project schedule and cost overruns (E5-4).
The research in Part I of this study indicated that there is a clear organizational divide between projects and operations and maintenance (O&M), and for most multi-facility/multi-product process industry companies, there are significant organizational hurdles that need to be addressed to integrate information systems between projects and O&M effectively (E9-25).
1 : Main Costs of Capital Facilities
The main costs for Avoidance (costs incurred to prevent or minimize the impact of technical interoperability problems), Mitigation (costs of activities responding to interoperability problems, including scrapped material costs), and Delay are mostly affecting owners and operators, and 85% of those costs were incurred during operations and maintenance (E5-3, page 5).
2 : Capital Facilities Industry Roadmap
In 2002, Uitgebreid Samenwerkingsverband Procesindustrie, Nederland (USPI-NL) laid out a Roadmap for reaching the goal of a fully integrated facility life cycle data repository, based on structured information standards. The Roadmap distinguishes between internal and external “data readiness.” The two are interdependent. Both internal and external data readiness are reached through restructuring work processes and introducing new tools (E5-3, page 8).
3 : Increasing Information Interdependence
Figure 4 shows the major facility life cycle phases, with the large arrows indicating traditional assumptions about information flow (E5-3, page 8). The smaller arrows indicate the emerging picture of a more complex and interdependent facility life cycle information flow. This indicates the need to extend thinking about information handovers to non-contiguous life cycle phases (E5-3, page 15).
4 : The Onion Model for Data Flow
To support electronic delivery of capital facility information, industry has undertaken various data exchange standardization efforts. A more recent example of a standard for capital facility information is ISO 15926, designed to provide a comprehensive standard for the description of process plant facilities throughout their life cycle. ISO 15926 employs a generic data model that is supplemented with templates and a reference data library to support any view of an information package and the complete life cycle of a facility.
ISO 15926 also supports mechanisms for the definition of custom templates for accessing and presenting model data in any way the end user requires. Templates can be “layered” to create different levels of abstraction. This is referred to as the “Onion Model.” The appropriate number of layers is still under discussion, so this aspect of the approach is not yet standardized. Figure 7 illustrates the concept (E5-3, page 33).