Modelling Plant Piping Project

Piping project is an uncertainty factor in power plant project. The current methods used in estimating costs in tendering phase are unreliable. The methods used for­modelling piping engineering are also imprecise. Piping design is one of the most significant cost drivers in plant design. Unreliability of estimations and an obvious lack of performance in piping design are regarded as outcomes of poor under­standing of the piping engineering process and outdated fashion of communica­tion between organisations. Companies taking part in a project have different information systems. Several meanings on same concepts exists. Introducing general project model, as a tem­plate, is expected to increase product data sharing and mutual understanding be­tween piping project participants. It also enables enhanced exploitation of concurrent engineering paradigm. As a result of the research a prototype software was demonstrated. The prototype was aimed for project and product data plan­ning, estimating and management. Piping system has various interrelationships with other systems in power plant. Thus piping engineering has an affect on most of the companies participating plant realisation. Sub-projects of a plant project have to be done concurrently. In order to decrease piping project duration, activities have to be overlapped and earlier phase by phase engineering process model is no longer valid. Thus a model for capturing project management knowledge has been developed.