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Data extraction from complex engineering drawings

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Project Description

Engineering drawings and diagrams are commonly used across different industries such as oil and gas, petrochemical, construction, transportation and others. Many legacy documents exist only as paper copies, scanned images or in pixelated format. Digitising these drawings is becoming increasingly important to enable conversion of information to a format which is compatible with other digital information relating to the same facility.

In this project the School of Computing Science and Digital Media at Robert Gordon University and DNV GL joined forces to develop an end-to-end platform for processing and analysing Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs). These diagrams are key pieces of information in describing the equipment, instrumentation safety systems used processing hydrocarbons and other chemicals on offshore platforms, petrochemical plants and refineries.

The solution delivered enables engineers to extract important information from a complex engineering drawing in less than five minutes. This includes recognising the majority of symbols pipelines and text. The output can then be exported as an Excel sheet for further analysis or as an annotated image. This paves the way to providing an automated system which will enable the extraction of data in a much more efficient manner than possible using existing manually processes. Full digitisation of these complex diagrams provides a rich source of information for further data analytics relevant to many engineering disciplines.

Status Project Complete
Funder(s) Oil & Gas Innovation Centre
The Data Lab
DNV GL
Value £106,870.00
Project Dates Aug 1, 2018 - Jul 31, 2019
Partner Organisations The Data Lab
DNV GL

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