Looking into the future of DEXPI authoring at Show & Tell 2024

At the beginning of September, some members of our team in Chiang Mai Thailand travelled all the way to Stravanger, Norway to meet clients, collaborate with our team in person, and to join this year’s DISC Show and Tell event, where we showcased our DEXPI (Data EXchange in the Process Industry) authoring solutions.  

Collaborating on the future of digitalisation in oil and gas

A major highlight of this trip was having Sunpech Samart (Jack) from the Draga team in Thailand join us for a full debrief on his part in managing the tool Model Broker by Semantum, the project which we would later get the content for our demo at the Show & Tell event. We were thrilled to have representatives from the whole team – including Jack – present to celebrate our achievements together at the live demo. 

DISC Show & Tell 2024

This year’s Show & Tell hosted by DISC at Equinor's Business Center in Stavanger, was an epicenter of innovation. We saw some incredible examples of integrating, visualizing, and sharing data in alignment with the DEXPI standard. 

It was an honor to be invited to attend Show & Tell alongside leaders in the digital transformation industry including Autotec, Siemens, Palantir, Cognizant, Hexagon, Semantum, Itera, LTImindtree, Webstep, Hontrel, and Plants and Bytes. By joining, we had a front seat to witness just how much digitalisation is changing the oil and gas industry, particularly in brownfield, engineering, and commissioning. 

The main topics of the event included:

• Digital brownfield and the automatic transfer of legacy documents to a digital twin

• Digital engineering greenfield and the interoperability in project execution through the value chain

• Digital commissioning, especially the digital automatic virtual verification of design and construction

Sharing our progress and ambitions for the future with Model Broker

Kent Andersen and Alex presented Draga onstage for the demo, and to share our collaboration with Semantum and their tool Model Broker.

Model Broker converts P&ID (Process and Instrumentation Diagram) data from computer aided design files (or CAD files for short), and exports them into the DEXPI format. This tool enables us to provide the basis for a single source of truth, and to communicate complex data in creative new ways. 

Kent Andersen and Alexander Kuznetsov (Alex) talked about our team’s hard work in developing MIMS Dynamic Render, so that we could auto-generate drawings from our MIMS Engineering Information Solutions. MIMS Dynamic Render can also speak DEXPI, A-ML, XML, JSON, and more. (If you learn more about MIMS Dynamic Render, our full presentation is available to watch online.)

The Draga team also manned a booth, where we answered questions about the MIMS Engineering and authoring solution and provided additional demos to anyone who missed our talk. 

Refining our DEXPI process with cross-collaboration

Jack has played an integral role in helping us create DEXPI formatted files from the Model Broker software. By helping us fully understand the main challenges he’d experienced, we were able to learn from them as a team.

In particular, we’ve discovered that P&ID symbols can be read as similar or completely different by a computer, which might not reflect their intended use by the engineers who created the P&ID drawings. 

Jack worked closely with Lailanie Ruedas (Lani), our expert in Process engineering and P&ID drawings, to better understand the applications of symbols in real life, make manual adjustments, and ensure the DEXPI files generated correspond to the real world. 

Collaboration at a global level

Here at Draga, we take pride in being a diverse team with people from all around the world who together drive exciting leaps and bounds in digital brownfield solutions, technical drawings, and DEXPI authoring and integration. It’s always a pleasure to see people from our branches come together – whether that’s in Norway, Thailand, or Singapore.