Idox launches automated tag extraction for digital twin enrichment

Idox, a leading developer of specialist information management solutions to engineering companies in complex process industries, including oil and gas, power generation and utilities, recently announced the launch of its automatic tag extraction capability within its flagship cloud document management solution, FusionLive.

For the first time, users can automatically extract and generate asset data to populate digital twins and link them to all related engineering documentation. This is essential for engineering firms to share trusted data with asset owners upon project handover, but has typically been undertaken manually at considerable delay and cost.

“A lot has been made of digital twins in the engineering sector but if they are not enriched and maintained effectively, they lose their value over time; they’re static, dead and of limited use. To live up to the hype, digital twins must be dynamic, living digital assets that change over time just as their real counterparts. Key to this process is having simple mechanisms to generate the data that feeds them and keeps them up to date.” explains Steven Bruce, Product Director at Idox.

“An engineer working on a project for an offshore platform, or a hydroelectric dam isn’t interested in a simple virtual tour of the asset – they want a digital twin tagged with up-to-date information on each component’s status, design, history and documentation. Barring the very largest companies, this wasn’t available before now – at least not without intensive and expensive manual tagging and data gathering processes – requiring significant continuous investment in time and resources.”

Idox sees particular value for engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) companies working on large, capital-intensive projects, such as in the offshore and onshore energy industries, where safety, risk and regulatory compliance are especially dependent on accurate information handover. With FusionLive already in use by a number of international companies, the integration of automatic tag extraction has been successfully trialled with a leading global EPC company, which has a contractual mandate from their client to include engineering tag to document data in the information handover.

The technology is an integration of Idox’s industry leading engineering information management platform, FusionLive, and its proprietary tag extraction and management technology. The tag extraction process scrapes hundreds of tags from documents within seconds and automatically validates them against a master tag register before the data is loaded into the digital twin.

Bruce concludes: “In a fiercely competitive, increasingly digital environment, EPCs must differentiate themselves not just on bid-costs, but on their ability to hand over accurate, enriched digital twins on-schedule. It won’t be long before owners refuse to settle for anything less.”