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Plant and Piping Software Design (AEC in Focus Column)
1 Mar, 2007 By: AIA ,H. Edward GoldbergSoftware offers capabilities for greater interoperability.
Plant and piping software has reached an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, stage. With much of today's industry dependent on processes involving the movement of liquids and gases, there's an ever-increasing need for this type of software to design the infrastructures that carry these commodities. Plant and piping software developers were early adopters of 3D modeling. These software offerings fall into two broad groups—2D schematics, such as P&IDs (piping and instrument diagrams) and instrument and electrical diagrams, and the physical design comprising 2D and 3D deliverables. What's notable is that more 3D-based design packages at all price levels are available, and they automatically produce the 2D deliverables, reports and BOMs (bills of materials) that were available only in high-priced offerings in the past.
Although most of these design applications run on either AutoCAD or MicroStation platforms, other offerings from AVEVA and Intergraph use their own graphics engines and output to either the DWG or DGN drawing formats.
This "AEC in Focus" column discusses some of the latest developments for this area of engineering.
AVEVA Plant Design and Engineering
www.aveva.com
AVEVA's PDMS (Plant Design Management System) is a comprehensive modeling system that creates 3D designs and deliverables (figure 1). It features model management, advanced clash management, visual review, automatic pipe routing and construction deliverables. Automated deliverables can be generated directly from the 3D model in the form of general arrangement and detail drawings, piping isometrics and reports. The product comes with industry catalogs and specifications, and the entire Victaulic piping catalog is available at no charge. AVEVA's Pipe Stress Inter-face provides data integration between piping designs and stress-analysis tools.
 Figure 1. AVEVA s PDMS creates 3D designs and deliverables using model management, advanced clash management, visual review, automatic pipe routing and construction deliverables features. |
Plant Engineering is an engineering data-management system that can be operated by globally dispersed project teams. It manages the flow of engineering data from its own database, front-end process data, P&ID, the 3D model, project control and material management databases. The software follows client-specific and industry-standard tag numbering and symbology conventions, which ensure that the product can be used in such industries as offshore, process and power. AVEVA's P&ID drafting application uses AutoCAD as its underlying CAD engine, and it outputs 2D deliverables in native AutoCAD format.
VNET, AVEVA's Internet information portal, is a multi-lingual information integration platform. It presents infor-mation from any source application and links it using item tags (or other identification) to present a coherent view of a plant, ship or project on any engineering desktop.
Bentley DigitalPlant
www.bentley.com/plant
Using its wide portfolio of MicroStation- and AutoCAD-based software, Bentley has developed the DigitalPlant solution that ties all of Bentley's Plant-related programs together through a central database. This column doesn't have enough room to describe all of Bentley's Plant-related solutions such as the AutoPlant, AXSYS and PlantSpace products, but Bentley has a comprehensive set of engineer-ing tools covering the widest range of disciplines, with integrated 2D and 3D functionality and integrated engineering analysis, across all phases of the lifecycle from FEED (front-end engineering design) to operations and maintenance.
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About the Author: H. Edward Goldberg
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