The engineering industry has rapidly come to a stage in entering into an age of unlimited competition through market opening and internationalization. To survive in the emerging highly competitive global market, there is a strong need of establishing an efficient system which supports all the activities over the life of the plant, such as conceptual design, cost estimating, detail design, construction, commissioning, operations, and maintenance.
The CALS effort began in the mid 1980s as a US DoD initiative to standardize and integrate digital product data as a means to reduce development time, lower costs and improve quality of many high technology systems. IDE(Integrated Data Environment) refers to an environment where all the data generated from the product life cycle can be shared by all partners, although geographically distributed and maintained in heterogeneous platforms. STEP is the international standard for the product model data exchange among heterogeneous systems and plays a key role in CALS.
The main purpose of this thesis is to suggest how to leverage CALS/IDE and STEP effectively for creating and sustaining competitive advantage in plant engineering business domain. The suggested approach has three steps. First, it presents strategic action plans for the impact of CALS in a plant engineering enterprise. Second, from US DoD's IDE and NIIIP's IVE reference architecture, IDE framework in plant engineering design environment will be developed and also specific core technologies will be described. Third, in the aspects of data sharing through STEP, the way to integrate engineering design data using process plant-related STEP application protocols under the suggested IDE framework is described. The methodology of federated database system and extended EXPRESS-V/X will be used to integrate STEP application protocols for the shared database.
