The objective is to develop and promote a general method for data exchange, data interoperability and data integration for the process industry covering all phases of the lifecycle of a (petro-)chemical plant, ranging from specification of functional requirements to assets in operation. This method shall cover formats and content to address various problems seen today:

- Avoid format conversions (and thereby data loss) when passing engineering data and documents across CAE system boundaries.

- Make handover of engineering data during and at the end of a project easy and cost-effective.

- Reduce data exchange barriers between different CAE systems or different customizations of the same CAE systems. Support long-term storage of plant data in a CAE system-independent format. Today's commonly used standard formats like PDF don't support value-added improvements or at best, they do so insufficiently.

- Simplify co-existence of different CAE systems within a company, e.g. due to mergers/acquisitions or different priorities in different business units.