The second driver for purchasing

[shamimhasan07]

3D modeling of industrial facilities and complex process installations is a particularly labor-intensive task, radically different from modeling buildings. Software for these purposes must also have certain specifics and require completely different knowledge and practical skills.
PlantLinker
PlantLinker
PlantLinker
PlantLinker is a software product for designing and 3D modeling industrial facilities and complex process installations for continuous production cycles.

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Tatyana Larina, project manager at CSD, interviewed Andrey Ivanovich Sladkovsky, one of the founders of the PlantLinker idea , during which she learned about the history of the creation and development of CAD in the conditions of competition with large Western vendors, and also asked about what pressing problems of Russian engineers are solved by the functionality of the system.

Can you briefly tell us about your company, its mission and the history of the product?

The PlantLinker company is the developer of the automated design system of the same name, as well as a set of other systems.

The idea arose during our work on the implementation and support of software in the field of Plant Design. In Russian, one can find such a definition - a system for automated design of industrial facilities and complex technological installations of a continuous production cycle. The main difference of such facilities is the presence of multiple pipeline systems and technological equipment. These features impose rather complex requirements on systems for design and 3D modeling.

In this market, the leading role has always been played and continues to be played by large foreign companies with such powerful solutions as Intergraph PDS/Smart 3D and PDMS/Aveva E3D.

The Russian market is very specific, since our companies started working with these solutions much later than they appeared: for example, the first version of the PDMS system was released in 1974. Plant Design software products penetrated the Russian market with great difficulty. I once participated in the first demonstration of the PDMS system at the NEVA-94 exhibition back in 1994. At that time, these systems "lived" on UNIX workstations: PDMS on Silicon Graphics/HP, and PDS on CLIX.

These systems began to be actively sold in the Russian Federation only in the 2000s.

All the participants in the development of PlantLinker are ordinary engineers with experience in this field. That is why we came up with such a slogan: "Created by engineers for engineers". And when we created the first version of the program, we could not even imagine that one day it would turn into some new CAD PlantLinker.

You already said that there were high-end solutions on the CAD market, such as E3D/PDMS from Aveva and Smart3D/PDS from Intergraph. Why did you create your system?

Initially, in 2015, when the ESG Bureau had already specialized in the implementation of Intergraph systems for many years, we began work on creating a solution for exchanging information between systems.

By that year, a unique situation had developed in which almost all players on the Russian market that participated in the design and modeling of industrial facilities and process installations already had such systems. And some purchased two different ones due to different customer requirements.

such systems was participation in projects conducted in our country by Western engineering companies. They phone number indonesia hired contractors to perform the work because they could not produce drawings according to our standards and did not understand the market well.

And that's why we had the idea to transfer objects from one system to another, to link them. That's how PlantLinker appeared, in the very name of which you can see the word "link". Then Tekla Structures, which is the standard CAD of building structures, "stuck" to this idea.

The idea arose, but it was unclear how to do it. Because all foreign systems are maximally closed and incompatible with each other and from the outside, in fact, represent a black box. All data transmission systems between them were also limited in their capabilities.

We were then inspired by the ideas of the XMpLant product from Noumenon. Aveva and Intergraph offered it for exchanging information between their systems. We helped Noumenon develop their product for Smart3D. And during this process we realized that it is possible to transfer data between different systems in the open XML format. And believe me, if someone had told us in 2015 that in so many years we would come to CAD, we would have considered them crazy and said that we would never fit into this. Because creating a system of this class is a colossal amount of work and a huge risk.

First, we created our own format for storing and transferring objects between our system prototype, Smart3D, and Tekla Structures. We took this idea to the HEXAGON/Intergraph conference in Las Vegas in 2016. At the stand, we first showed the PlantLinker prototype and felt a great interest in our product from conference participants from different countries, including Intergraph representatives. This inspired us a lot, and we realized that we had something to strive for. In 2018, we again took part in the HEXAGON conference in Las Vegas and noted a keen interest in our development.

Let me note again that back then, in 2016, the idea was to create a system for transferring objects and models. With the transfer of models, the idea arose to create a viewer so that they could be visualized and some simple operations could be performed on them, and the work "boiled".