Relationship between Plant P&ID drawings and 3D drawings

[Bryanf88]

Hello all.

    I was wondering if there is any sort of relationship between P&ID's and 3D models in Plant 3D aside from belonging to the same project? What I would like to accomplish is to establish a link between the P&ID and model so that when I make a change or update to the P&ID, the model will notify me about the change. I've tried so many things with hardly any luck at all, is this even possible?

[dave.wolfe]

No notifications, but you can run a validation report.  The validate project and validation settings are available by right-clicking on the project name in the project manager.

They are governed by the P&ID/Plant 3D mapping settings under Plant 3D DWG in Project Setup.

[ErwinT]

Dave,

Is it possible to link properties from P&ID to 3D in 2014 (or maybe 2015) version? For my purpose using Plant3D it is a great setback that Plant3D uses 2 databases so I couldn't link properties real time between P&ID and 3D.

[dave.wolfe]

No, plant works off more of a properties push from P&ID to Plant.  So, when you use the P&ID Line List palette to insert items, their data gets pushed to the Plant 3D.

While Linking sounds like the right way to go, in reality that would be a pretty bad thing, unless the program were really well written. For example, typically the person working on P&IDs is a new piper.  Would you want their change to modify the model directly? Or vice versa, what if the piping designer made a model change right before the P&ID were to be issued, and it was not verified. These types of workflows need to be really well thought out and planned, before being implemented in a product.

The validation manager is REALLY powerful, and covers a lot of scenarios well.  In addition, if you know .Net you can extend its capabilities with a plugin.

[dgorsman]

Validation is certainly the better option over direct linking.  I've used the large scale software that does this, and universally the feature is ignored.  It requires absolute precision on both sides of the 2D/3D divide for both designers and support personnel.  That clashes rather badly with the usual "Just make the plot/PDF look nice, we need this issued yesterday" style of P&ID management and causes a lot of grey hairs on the support people.

[hesh]

I've got some additional questions regarding this. I'm not an expert with Plant3D but do have some basic knowledge. 

According what I've been told the following is possible:

Push from P&ID to 3D of:

- Lines

- Inline equipment

Validate properties from 3D to P&ID of:

- Equipment

- Inline equipment

So this means no information can be pushed from P&ID to 3D from equipment like vessels and pumps. 
Am I correct in my assumption? To me it seems a bit weird that I'm required to input the info of a pump in both the P&ID and 3D module after which I can validate these. Pushing seems to be the easier option in my opinion. 

Furthermore why can't line properties not be validated? I definitely would like to know in 3D if someone changes the diameter on the P&ID or the material class. 

[dave.wolfe]

Lines, line properties and tagged line items can and will be validated as well.

The reason the push doesn't happen for Equipment from P&ID to Plant is that the push is set up using the P&ID Line palette, through which you cannot insert equipment.  Hopefully at some point they'll introduce a tag lookup when you're assigning tags in the model, but that's not there yet.