Company Profile
Noumenon – “An object of
intellectual intuition”
Company Profile
Noumenon – “An object of
intellectual intuition”
Adrian Laud 5th November 2004
Background
Noumenon Consulting Ltd was formed by Adrian Laud in April 1998 as a consultancy company specialising in information integration with a particular focus on process plant information.
Adrian has over 25 years of experience in the integration of information throughout the lifecycle for electronics and process plant information. During that time he has been a consultant to most of the major CADCAM vendors, many EPC and Owner Operator companies. He has conceived and designed two integration technologies (for full details there is a biography of Adrian). The first was developed and sold by his previous company and was a STEP based technology
The latter, XMpLant, was conceived by him and developed by Noumenon to provide a leading edge integration environment for intelligent process plant models. A world first was achieved, late in 1999, using XMpLant to convert the intelligent process plant model for a ship from PDS to CADDS5 AEC for BAE Systems.
The second major project was for Unilever, in collaboration with CEA Systems, where intelligent process plant models were converted from PDS to Plant 4D early in 2000.
In May 2000 INOVx, who specialise in developing intelligent plant models using Photogrammetry, embraced the XMpLant technology and embedded it within their CADLinx product.
By July 2000 Cadcentre (now Aveva) committed to the use of XMpLant to open the information of their products and enable integration between their own and third party products. XMpLant is the publishing mechanism for 2D drawings, P&ID's and 3D models for Aveva's VNET product and Noumenon work closely with Aveva on this.
During 2001 Bentley, Rebis, ESSI and ORACLE adopted the XMpLant model so that nine of the major players in the process plant market adopted XMpLant. ESSI and Rebis are now part of Bentley and XMpLant is to be the integration model throughout their product range. Current projects in Bentley are developing the read and write interfaces for AutoPlant and PlantSpace.
One of the biggest problems with the conversion of piping information from one intelligent system to another is "Catalogues" and Specifications". Piping applications rely totally on these and they are usually configured for each project. Effective conversion therefore requires that "Catalogues" and "Specifications" exist in the target system that are compatible with the source system. This is rarely the case and a major effort is required to build them.
Another world first was achieved in September 2002 where "Catalogues" and "Specifications" were converted from PDS into the neutral XMpLant model and then the PDMS interface was used to load these into PDMS Catalogues and Specifications.
A lot more has been done in this area which will lead to a system for management of neutral "Catalogues" and "Specifications".
A current ISO project is for the extension of ISO 15926 to include 2D and 3D geometry. This is by reference to ISO 10303-42 - the whole concept of XMpLant.
There are more than 60 companies that have subscribed to the XMpLant group http://groups.msn.com/XMpLant
Noumenon is a small, privately owned profitable organisation that delivers pragmatic solutions using innovative technology based on open international standards of ISO (10303 and 15926) and the World Wide Web Consortium (XML). It is in partnership with some of the major players in the process industry through whom future revenue streams are expected to grow.
A key factor is that Noumenon is independent of the vendors of the systems for design and operation of process plant and has a close relationship with many of the major ones. This enables Noumenon to be able to work with competing companies so that issues that arise in integrating the information of these systems can be resolved.
There is a massive scope for XMpLant with Owner Operators
to facilitate the conversion of information ("handover") from the engineering
systems to operations and maintenance. Such systems are currently being
investigated.
XMpLant Technology
The key factor for the success of the technology lies in its flexibility. The majority of process plant projects "customise" the systems they use to meet the needs of the project. These systems are also very complex as they are dealing with complex engineering information. Much of the engineering information is also encoded in the application itself making it difficult to interpret the "data" to extract the "information".
This new technology uses the flexible data model of EPISTLE (European STEP Technical Liaison Executive) (ISO 15926) and STEP based geometry (ISO 10303-42) implemented using XML. It also uses XML to enable each of the system specific interfaces to be configured so that the "rules" or semantics of the application can be defined in order to "interpret" the "data" using the "rules" of the application and so delivering a neutral "information model". A key point here is that the information model created will have the same structure independent of the system the information comes from. The structures used internally in all of the major system are very different.
The use of STEP for geometric representation and the EPISTLE Reference Data Library for the classification
of plant items and XML for the form of the model provides a pragmatic
open neutral model for the integration of process plant information.
The model is defined as an XML Schema that is in the public
domain and posted to the XMpLant group (http://groups.msn.com/XMpLant).
Clients
process plant systems vendors
Aveva (formerly Cadcentre), Bentley Systems , CEA Systems, Design Power, INOVx, ORACLE, Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC)
End Users
Business with end users also includes pure consultancy as well as XMpLant related work. These companies include
BAE Systems Ltd, BP, Foster Wheeler,
Intergraph, Shell