Efficient navigation through industrial process plant topologies

The TopNav method

Abstract

Process engineers design industrial process plants using piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs). Data analysts who diagnose plant disturbances based on historical signal trends usually analyze these complex diagrams manually on paper, which
is time-consuming and error-prone. In the last 15 years, researchers have thus proposed several approaches and tools to turn these diagrams into machine-readable models that can be processed by software tools. However, these tools lack sophisticated query interfaces and intuitive visualizations. We propose the TopNav method to navigate plant topology models and aid data
analytics. The method supports systematic searches for elements and paths in topology models and the feeding of results into analytical tools to facilitate statistical analyses. In a user study we observed an up to 90% time reduction compared to manual
P&ID analysis, while errors were significantly reduced.