A Schema-Guided Transformation Approach for Engineering Documents in Process Automation

Abstract

Process automation information is often required for digital reuse long before it is available as structured engineering data. In brownfield plants and heterogeneous tool landscapes, relevant facts remain distributed across engineering documents such as piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs), instrument loop diagrams, terminal plans, and circuit diagrams. Targetside standards such as the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) and Data Exchange in the Process Industry (DEXPI) provide important digital structures, but they do not remove the sourceside normalization problem. This paper presents a schema-guided transformation approach in which recovered document content is assigned to predefined, document-family-specific intermediate schemas before deterministic downstream transformation is executed. A document family groups all sources conveying comparable engineering semantics, regardless of tool-specific format or layout, and therefore spans multiple concrete document types within the same engineering view. The resulting separation between nondeterministic extraction and deterministic mapping improves reviewability, limits semantic drift, and preserves transferability across plants that expose comparable engineering information. A prototype implementation operationalizes the concept through family-aware extraction, evidence-based review, and export into AAS-oriented targets. The contribution therefore is a controlled normalization layer that turns document-bound engineering information into stable input for downstream digital integration and not into a new target metamodel.