Martin G. Skjæveland, Anders Gjerver, Christian M. Hansen, Johan Wilhelm Klüwer, Morten R. Strand, Arild Waaler and Per Øyvind Øverli.
Abstract: Aibel is a global engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) service company based in Norway, best known for its major capital contracts for building and maintaining large offshore platforms for the oil and gas industry. Aibel has taken significant steps to move away from a manual document-driven process to a digitalised process of selecting appropriate design artefacts and finding matching products. This is done by representing all requirements and specifications in a custom- built large-scale ontology of ∼80.000 classes called the Material Master Data (MMD) ontology, and using automated reasoning and queries over the ontology to perform matching and selection. The effect is that these tasks are performed with greater precision and to lesser effort than with Aibel's legacy system, ultimately resulting in a design of higher quality, which again reduces the total time and cost of construction. Using the open standard language OWL to represent the information in an application-independent manner allows the MMD ontology to be applicable throughout Aibel's tool-chain and avoids locking in to specific vendor's tools and work-processes.
Keywords: ontology; reasoning; requirements matching; industry standards