Down the Pipes

AVEVA conference uncovers a huge niche market, a laser show and leads to Autodesk speculation

Roopinder Tara, CADdigest, October 27, 2004

If you are still using AutoCAD for plant design, consider this your wake up call. Specialized software built just for the piping and process industries will run circles around you—and your competition is already using it.

Digital mode of paper mill created with AVEVA's VANTAGE PDMS. Courtesy of O'Neal Constructors

I was recently invited to attend the ISEIT (International Symposium for Engineering IT), a conference put on by AVEVA, one of the three big players in the plant design software business (Intergraph and Bentley being the other two). It was appropriately located in Houston, Texas, the center of the US oil industry and a veritable thicket of offshore oil platforms and oil refining plants. We’ve all seen plants like them, amazing, brightly lit massive structures of dense but orderly pipes, either from the highway or on the news, churning out petroleum or some chemical.

As with any industry, this is one complete with its own tools, players and terminology. I may have been the only one who didn’t know the difference between a greenfield and a brownfield project or what P&ID stood for. And I’m sure “erection schedule” meant something other than what first sprung to mind.

However, it was quite apparent to me upon seeing a 3D rendered valve being dragged around a bend in real time that someone using ordinary 2D programs (or God forbid, a drafting board) to do piping work was just hopelessly behind the times. The big boys in the industry (AVEVA’s customer list includes Exxon, 3M, BASF, DuPont and a host of other Fortune 500 companies) weave their pipes in three dimensions.

The Clash

By working in 3D, companies using 3D piping software manage to reduce, if not avoid, clashes -- interferences between the pipes themselves as well as with supporting structures, electrical conduit, ductwork, cabletrays and the like. "Even at 1% of project total installed cost, rework can amount to millions of dollars in a greenfield project -- without 3D this can be much higher" says Tom Greaves of Spar Point Research <http://www.sparllc.com/> . Greaves notes that using 3D laser scanning work processes, brownfield project rework can be driven down to greenfield levels. Sometimes it is a case of ‘pay me now or sue me later.’ More money seems to be spent on litigation fees in this industry than on 3D design software," says Greaves, whose firm has documented the success of EPC and owner/operator firms investing in 3D.

Industry specific parts

Why spend hours on a part if you can just drop it in? A piping designer needs to show not just pipes but the supporting structures (steelwork), various equipment (pumps, valves, etc.), and related hardware (hangers, foundations, etc.). AVEVA saves one the trouble of drawing these items by supplying them in droves, either by itself or through 3rd parties. Hanger software can draw all kinds of hangers for you in the context of the pipes, smartly obtaining the dimensions it needs from the model. Dimension Solutions <www.dimsoln.com> was on hand to show a myriad of support structures and foundations. AVEVA has wisely recognized that marshalling third parties such as Dimension Solutions and REI (makers of STAAD for structural analysis) will only add to the popularity of its own software.

Money for 3D and Your Drawings for Free

Add to the advantages above the fact that once you design in 3D, you only have to push a button to generate the necessary isometric, 2 line drawings (complete with dimensions) and schematics. These tasks once enlisted entire groups of designers and drafters. That by itself ought to be worth the price of admission.

Laser Scanners, Thousands and Thousands Points of Light

On the cutting edge of technology are the 3D laser scanning systems, several of which were on display at ISEIT. Using a tripod mounted system, a laser was directed by a twitching mirror to send a red dot streaking up and down the room. The system returns millions (even billions) of 3D coordinates. The resulting point clouds might look like a blood shot Milky Way but stare long enough – or better yet, move the point cloud around—and the constellations give way to the walls, lights, chairs and people.

I had to ask if the unit was eye-safe. “I wouldn’t recommend you stare into the laser beam,” said Darrel Shaffer of Leica Geosystems <www.hds.leica-geosystems.com>  “But we use a low power laser. Also, note that the beam scans so rapidly, it could never do damage.”

This should be a boon to owners of aging plants, points out Greaves. Faced with the cost of creating new plants, companies are electing to modernize existing plants. Doing so requires documentation of what exists currently. Obsolescence and memory being what they are, such documentation either cannot be found or doesn’t exist. Having to measure the existing equipment for purposes of creating drawings of the “as-builts” historically has meant a person (or persons) armed with a tape measure and pads of paper must laboriously record thousands of dimensions that, when taken back to the office, are converted into a model. However, with the entry of 3D laser scanners, one person can basically prop up a machine that will, within minutes, spill into his laptop a million measurements accurate to within a quarter inch.

While the field of view of the laser unit can be wide, it can generate measurements only of what it can “see.” Rotating the resulting point cloud shows substantial missing areas. In practice, the operator would reposition the laser unit and scan again to fill in missing areas. Physical markers on the scene provide accurate registration allowing it to stitch together multiple scans to complete the 3D model. Overlapping points can be merged using a supplied tolerance. Further work involving meshing algorithms can transform the points into a mesh. As a final step, the surface can be used as a template for intelligent objects such as pipes, valves, pumps, etc. The end result of an existing plant would then be presented to the owner so they could begin modifying onscreen what they would have had to do with paper or models.

As a laser is just light, which can be reflected or absorbed, I had to ask how the Leica HDS Cyrax system would do when faced with shiny or very dark surfaces. “Some of the beam does return,” said Shaffer. Even bright metal ductwork would work. “It would have some dust on it that would reflect.” Leica has several 3D laser scanners and is not limited to plant design but applicable also to surveyors and manufacturing. Leica does provide training in the use of its equipment.

A Quantapoint scan results in isometric, shaded surface view of a platform. Sure beats trying to decipher a point cloud.

Another vendor, Quantapoint <http://www.quantapoint.com>, focuses (no pun intended) on providing solutions for plant redesign. If you don't want to staff up, train personnel, buy equipment for a one-time redesign, use Quantapoint and they will deliver to you a digital model of your plant using laser scanning. How much money, you ask. "It varies with the job, depending on the amount of plant that is digitized," says James McGill, Vice President of Marketing for Quantapoint. "Remember, the alternative is having a team of people in a plant taking a few hundred manual measurements over several days or weeks, which is very costly and time-consuming--not to mention unsafe. With Quantapoint, a two-person team spends a day or two onsite and generates hundreds of millions of very accurate measurements. We process the data in two days and ship the client a digital model." Okay, would it be in the tens of thousands of dollars or hundreds of thousands. "Tens of thousands is typical. It would have to be a large facility to be hundreds," says McGill.

Quantapoint scans looked much different than Leica's. Instead of a point cloud, the Quantapoint image was easily discernible for what it was. I asked to zoom in to see the points, which crashed the software McGill was using. "I'm using an early alpha version of our PRISM 3D digital plant software, which is scheduled for release in December. Ideally, you should have a gigabyte of memory, these models can be BIG, depending on how much of the digital plant you load," explained McGill. Upon reloading and zooming in on the model, he explained how Quantapoint system uses a phase-based sine wave laser capable of creating high-resolution images that look like black and white picture rather than points. This seems like a big advantage to this editor.

Autodesk Relationship—More Than Just Friends?

Headquartered in Cambridge, England, AVEVA execs are all Brits. Originally known as Cadcentre in 1967, earliest products ran on big DEC computers. Still a bit stodgy and every bit “not from around here,” AVEVA has nevertheless succeeded in getting a big share of the American and international plant design market. Its biggest competitors (Intergraph and Bentley) are American companies. Think selling a foreign CAD product to Americans is easy? Only Dassault Systemes has done it successfully—and it had to partner with IBM to do it. An Italian MCAD vendor had to change its name (think3) and move stateside and takes care not to mention its foreign heritage. Nemetschek, though very successful in Germany, gave up on its American operations and went home.

Perhaps to solidify the lucrative American relationship, AVEVA has licensed AutoCAD to run inside its Vantage product. While AVEVA has—and continues to offer—its own 2D CAD capabilities, AVEVA CEO Richard Longdon refers proudly to the Autodesk allegiance. AVEVA users can now have an easier time with the software, as the world is full of AutoCAD-trained operators. However, one cannot help but wonder what Autodesk has in mind. AVEVA has a market cap of $225 million and is so successful and promising that, according to Longdon, when they sought funding to buy Tribon (they needed $40 million), UK banks queued up for the privilege of lending them money. With its recent acquisition of Tribon, AVEVA has extended its reach into ship design. Tribon had a virtual lock on hull design done by most of the world’s big ship builders. If one can assume that the rest of the ship is really not much different than a floating platform—an area in which AVEVA is well established--they are now in a position to address the total design needs of another huge industry.

So does an AVEVA look like a plum to a cash-rich and acquisition-happy Autodesk? For precedence, one has only to look as far back as July of 2002 when the piping design software company Rebis was acquired by Bentley, Autodesk's arch competitor. AVEVA has a healthy share of a market that could be considered complementary to AEC, a market many would argue Autodesk already owns. Also, AVEVA sells a vertical product at a higher price (read higher margins) than its own AutoCAD. The icing on the cake: most of AVEVA’s US customers are subscription-based—an attribute coveted by Autodesk. Conspiracy theorists may also delight in noting that among attending AVEVA proceedings was an Autodesk employee, ostensibly there to “keep and eye on platform solutions.”

Other Highlights from the Conference

• Son, I have to let you go
  Cartoon of a father introducing outsourcing to his son, “Unfortunately, we have decided raising a child overseas would be a lot cheaper.”
• Coming to a workforce near you
  Today’s high schooler will do his homework while doing IM [instant messaging], email, listening to music and watching TV.
• Fear of burning to death overcomes fear of heights
  An inspirational speaker with acrophobia who used to light himself and dive a hundred feet into a pool was asked if he used a fire suit. “No. I had a layer of clothes soaked in water under a layer soaked with gasoline.”
• I Is A Engineer
  Most common problem observed in PowerPoint slides: capitalization. For example: Capitalization to add Emphasis to words that are not Proper nouns.