Highlights:

• Use of Standards ensures 100% drawing accuracy
• Windows Wizard architecture is easily understood - no CAD training required
• Equipment Configuration Choices based on pre-defined choices in the standard drawings
• Marker Text updated in drawings with user-entered values saves hundreds of manual edits
• Interface with  Document Management System to incorporate drawings created
• Bill of Materials Extraction
• Material Order Generation

Select/Create Work Order

Add Transmission/Distribution “Standard” to Project

The next step is the selection of a “standard” to add to the project.  Transmission and distribution “standards” consist of one more required drawings and either a required drawing choice, an optional drawing choice or no drawing choice.  When the standard is selected, the designer will see a listbox of drawing choices, if any are required, for the selected standard.  Once the standard and drawing choice(s) have been made, the Wizard copies the selected standard’s drawings into the project directory.

Select Equipment Configuration Choice

Standards often contain equipment configuration choices (i.e., control voltage configurations of either 48V or 125V). Equipment configuration options are represented on different specific levels in the standards drawings.  

The Wizard simplifies the equipment configuration process for the designer by querying the project’s CAD drawings for configuration information, then prompting the user to make a single configuration choice from a listbox.  

Once a choice has been made the Wizard then deletes the geometry from the unselected configuration levels and what remains is the selected equipment configuration choice.

Enter Project Specific “Marker Text”

In most cases, the use of design standard in different locations involves filling in the same types of information (i.e., bay, panel, breaker id) with different values based only the location of the standard.  To automate this task, “marker text” (text with special delimiters such as “^BAY^”) is used on the standards to represent any piece of information that would change.  The Wizard queries all the drawings in the standard and compiles a list of all marker text.  The unique marker text (since many are used several times throughout the standard) is displayed in an Excel-like spreadsheet grid and the user enters the “location-specific” values into the grid.  The Wizard then substitutes the values the user entered back into all the drawings.  This involves up to several hundred (700) individual text substitutions on a large standard.

Interface with the Document Management System

Since the Wizard generates a lot of CAD drawings, an interface into the document management system is necessary so the drawings become centrally managed. 

Once the drawings are created (copied from the standards), an ASCII file with drawing information is generated which is imported by the document management system.

Bill of Materials Generation

The material generation process extracts the material information from the drawings (material tables are maintained on specific levels on the standard drawings) and placing it into the database.

This insures 100% accuracy as well as requires very little of the designer’s time.

Once the material information has been collected from the drawings, ASCII material order files are created which are directly imported by the materials management system.