DEXPI

DEXPI (Data Exchange in the Process Industry) answers a specific, expensive question: how does a P&ID leave the tool that authored it without dying into a picture? The specification defines a standard representation of P&ID content — equipment, piping, instrumentation, their properties and their connectivity — carried in an XML-based format, so that owner-operators can receive intelligent P&IDs from contractors regardless of authoring system, and downstream applications can consume the diagram as data. The initiative is driven by process-industry owners and implemented, progressively, by the major authoring vendors, in alignment with the broader plant-data standardisation work around ISO 15926.

Its scope is worth stating precisely: DEXPI standardises the exchange of already-intelligent P&IDs. It describes the destination, not the journey — the millions of legacy P&IDs existing as scans and flat CAD are outside its gift until something first reconstructs their content as data. And as with every exchange standard, conformance varies by implementation: what round-trips cleanly between tools is discovered by testing, not by reading the press releases.