ISO 15926 is the foundation of a semantic web for process and power plant design and operations. Its support by CAD vendors in the plant space has become ubiquitous.

With the release of its SmartPlant P&ID ISO 15926 Export Utility Intergraph is extending its support for the nearly ubiquitous ISO 15926 standard for data exchange in process and power plant design. The new addition to the SmartPlant suite exports piping and instrumentation diagrams in the popular ISO format, which means data as well as graphical content can be exchanged with other ISO-compliant plant design and information management solutions.

SmartPlant Foundation already supports the ISO 15926 standard, within its data-oriented Interfaces and Views approach to plant modeling. It maps plant model data from its proprietary software to the generic object-relational schemas of the ISO standard. This new utility for P&ID extends support to diagramming, a crucial element of the plant design process that has often been done with 2D CAD programs based on manual extraction of plant data from 3D plant design models.

Intergraph says more than 500,000 P&ID diagrams have been created in SmartPlant over the years, all of which can now be exported in ISO 15926 format.

Successfully moving beyond

When Intergraph first came out with the data-oriented SmartPlant as a replacement for its drawing-based PDS software for plant design, competitors were quick to point out the new system was fundamentally incompatible with its older PDS. Bentley Systems, in particular, won over quite a few Intergraph customers, since its MicroStation CAD software was the foundation of PDS. But the arrival of ISO 19526 has re-arranged the playing field, and Intergraph benefits as much as anyone.

This particular utility may seem late to the game, but in the larger scheme of things, it was important for Intergraph to get ISO 15926 support right in SmartPlant Foundation first, then move outward.