Automation applied to technical drawings in industry: Interview with Vasil Shteriyanov

In their paper Automating the Expansion of Instrument Typicals in Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs), presented at The Thirty-Seventh Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI 2025), Vasil Shteriyanov, Rimma Dzhusupova, Jan Bosch and Helena Holmström Olsson focus on automation of technical drawings in industry. In this interview, Vasil tells us more about their work. Our paper focuses on automating the Instrument Typical Expansion process in Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs), which are vital technical drawings used in the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) industry. P&IDs are used to represent the layout of piping systems, instruments, and other equipment in large-scale infrastructure projects. A key challenge with P&IDs is that they often include Instrument Typicals – simplified representations of standard instrument assemblies, rather than visualizing each individual instrument.