Building a Reference Model for the PLM Processes in Engineering and Contracting Sector

The management of the processes related to proposal, design, construction, start-up, operation and decommissioning of industrial plants, in few words the whole Plant Lifecycle, are usually performed each by means of a specialised information tool, because of the peculiarities of the Engineering and Contracting (E&C) sector. The E&C Companies are aware of the need to move towards an integration of such tools, under the umbrella of the PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) new acronym. As in other sectors, like the manufacturing industry, such convergence happens in two different ways: a) the modular offer of a single software vendor, usually a market leader, who tries to establish a proprietary data warehouse of all the lifecycle information; b) an agreement of different players on some standard for the representation of such information, in order to develop IT tools which are able to access and exchange meaningful information. Whichever approach will emerge as a winner, the authors think that it would be useful to define a Reference Model for the Plant Lifecycle processes, proposing an ontology for their business and technical objects, their relationships and management. Such reference model, developed in a standard modelling language, could be of great help both in developing new integrated PLM solutions, and to enable stand-alone packages to establish an effective integrations based on the data and information.