About the Author

Gord Rachar has a strong personal interest in Engineering Automation based on over 35 years of experience in plant design. He became interested in ISO 15926 as soon as he heard about it, and volunteered to write what was originally called The ISO 15926 Primer. A piping designer by trade, he currently manages a 3D engineering design system at an EPC office in Edmonton, Canada.

Gord's plant engineering experience includes supervising a design office and setting up standards, brownfield and greenfield engineering design and cost estimating, construction progress and quality monitoring, and fabrication shop spooling and production planning. He has additional experience developing industrial piping specifications, developing software for engineering applications, and technical writing.

Gord Rachar

The Author, having realized too late the folly of jumping out of a perfectly good airplane

On a more personal note, this book is a good example of "Be careful what you ask for." Part of my job is to keep up to date with trends in Plant Design. Having personally experienced the difficulty of transferring information between different proprietary formats, I was extremely interested to find that a better way was, well, on the way. ISO 15926 was something my company should not remain ignorant of, but the available information about it went directly from very brief summaries of the eventual benefits, to extremely complex descriptions of technology complete with big words and complex acronyms. There was nothing in between that explained how ISO 15926 would deliver its seemingly magical promise, in language that upper management, who would have to sign off on funding proposals, could absorb quickly.

Finally, responding to my repeated requests for something that did not exist, one of the developers of ISO 15926 asked me if I wanted to put my money where my mouth was. The rest has been a personally enlightening experience. From discovering the roots of the grail-like search for true digital interoperation, to seeing the tremendous work that has been done that lead to ISO 15926, to meeting and getting to know some of the people that have provided the underlying theoretical framework, has been extremely fascinating.

Acknowledgements

My original request was for introductory information with which I could craft a proposal for my company. If I'd found it, I wouldn't have had to write it myself. Therefore, I did not think it inappropriate to "borrow heavily" from (read: blatantly plagiarize) the works of others. Some of what I've copied has been heavily re-worked, but some is verbatim. I've tried to acknowledge the sources, but if I've missed anything, please drop me an e-mail at:

Having said that , there are a few who deserve special mention:

  • Robin Benjamins, Bechtel
    Steering Committee Chairman of the POSC Caesar project: Intelligent Data Sets (IDS)
  • Onno Paap, Fluor Corporation
    Project Manager of the FIATECH project: Accelerating Deployment of ISO 15926 (ADI)
  • Julian Bourne, NRX Global
  • Ian Glendinning, DNV
  • Hans Teijgeler, Flour Corporation (Retired)
  • Manoj Dharwadkar, Bentley Systems
  • Glen Worrall, Bentley Systems

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