Etteplan and SFS Trained an Engineering AI That Knows the Standards

ETTEPLAN OYJ, Press release, August 13, 2024 at 9:00 a.m. (EEST)

Etteplan and SFS Trained an Engineering AI That Knows the Standards

Technology services company Etteplan has developed a generative AI-powered service solution for technical designers, in collaboration with SFS, the central standardization organization in Finland. In various design tasks, such as equipment design or process design, it is important that the plans are based on up-to-date standards and utilize existing design guidelines. However, there are tens of thousands of standards in use, and searching for the right information takes valuable design time.

Etteplan’s AI team contacted SFS and proposed a collaboration, resulting in a groundbreaking web-based AI-powered service. In the service, a designer can converse with a conversational bot that understands natural language text and quickly finds the right standard or design guideline from the vast pool of information and various sources. The service helps organize and comprehend this information.

“Our goal was to create an easy-to-use and, above all, reliable AI service that our designers — and, in the future, our customers — could utilize. We wanted the service to leverage the best of what generative AI has to offer while avoiding any misleading information that the AI may invent on its own. Designers must be able to trust the accuracy of the information provided by the AI, ” states Tero Hämeenaho, the director of Etteplan’s AI team.

The reliability of the information is ensured through source references. When the designer inputs an information request, the service provides an excerpt from the standard and a link to the source information.

Another groundbreaking aspect of the service is its ability to search for information from images.

“All data entered into the service is vectorized. Both design guidelines and standards contain large amounts of images, diagrams, and drawings, so it is essential that the AI can extract the relevant information from them, ” Hämeenaho explains.

SFS, celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, was immediately excited about the project and helped Etteplan’s team open up the interfaces of the closed standard collection.

“Our collaboration with Etteplan has been truly exciting. Generative AI is at its best when sifting through massive amounts of data, with our vast collection of standards being a prime example. The purpose of this tailored technology is to start offering a service where searches can be precisely filtered, and where sources as well as the timeliness of the information can be instantly verified. This is sure to have a positive impact on the customer experience, ” envisions Meri Valtiala, the expert responsible for the AI standardization group at SFS.

Thousands of standards, as well as Etteplan’s own design guidelines and documents, have been fed into the service. The tool will be utilized by the majority of Etteplan’s global staff of 4, 000 people, and it will be continuously developed to become an even more efficient tool.

“The service is built on top of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, in a closed environment. The smooth development was enabled by the team’s ability to leverage both Etteplan’s cloud architects and AI developers, ” Hämeenaho says.

Etteplan also customizes similar service solutions for its clients, enriching the standards with the client’s own design documents.

For more information, please contact:
Outi Torniainen, SVP, Marketing and Communications, Etteplan, tel. +358 10 307 3302
Tero Hämeenaho, AI Program Director and Head of Additive Manufacturing, Etteplan, tel. +358 10 307 2757
Outi Rask, Head of Development, SFS, tel. +358 50 4491 585, email outi.rask@sfs.fi