Page 19 - Industrial Plants

rely only on the documentation that the customer is
able to provide.
Furthermore, when the team comes to the detailed
engineering phase it may be that it is provided with
documentation which does not necessarily reflect how
the plant has been built, compared to how it was
designed. So, the team might not know fundamental
details such as the “routing” of an existing line, the
position of existing supports (support points of the line),
available measuring instruments on the line, or the
position or size of the civil structures.
In these cases, it is necessary that members of the
engineering team go to the plant site and verify the
state of the plant, to collect the information necessary
for the subsequent engineering activity. The site
inspections are normally conducted with papers, pen,
simple measuring systems and existing drawings. It
may be that, during the site inspections, the engineering
team needs to get in touch with other team members
who are located in the technical offices in order to
exchange information useful to the activity (for example,
names of items or specific measurements).
In these cases, because of limited information that the
two teams can exchange via phone calls, it is very
complicated to instruct the team
member who is on the site to get the
right information. This application,
For this purpose, we propose the use which is based on a
of a collaborative remote Augmented combinaton of mobile
Reality (AR) application, which can and augmented
help the two engineering teams reality technologies,
collaborate to rapidly collect was initially designed
necessary and correct information. as a support for
This application was originally industrial maintenance
operations
developed to support companies in
T he revamping of a refinery is an It is based on a combination of
their remote maintenance operations.
intervention that, by means of a
augmented reality and mobile technologies. It enables
engineering
several team members to exchange information by
functional
complex
communicating with symbols, words or by sketching
activity, focuses on the optimization
and/or recovery of existing plants.
This kind of activity requires multiple
or sketches can be added to these pictures and the
engineering specialists to work together, i.e. it is a onto pictures taken in existing plants. Symbols, words,
team at site can visualize this information superimposed
collaborative engineering task force. In order to start the onto the real environment, thanks to the use of
activities, the customer (refinery) must provide the augmented reality technology.
engineering specialists with the entire plant In our vision, the remote augmented reality application
documentation they wish to revamp (Civil Drawings, would help the two teams (the one on the plant and the
Piping Layout, ISO, P & ID, Equipment Drawings etc.), one in the office) to interact by exchanging information
and also provide the specialists detailed specifications. in order to create a complete documentation of the site
Combining the information provided by the customer for subsequent interventions.
with information taken by using laser scanning In the following, we describe the remote augmented
technology, which is a technology largely used to get reality application we developed for industrial
geometrical information from the existing plant, the maintenance operations, which might be used in such
engineering team begins to work on the revamping a situation to allow the team member at site to interact
activity. In case the engineering team is not equipped with those who are in the office and to better understand
with any recent laser scanning technology, they must the demands made by the office team and to create the

IndustrIal Plants - May 2017
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