AVEVA is now shipping Laser Model Interface (LMI), a software solution that provides a direct link between AVEVA’s VANTAGE Plant Design Management System (PDMS) and five of the major 3D laser scanning systems being utilized to capture as-built data for retrofit and brownfield engineering projects.
This release was driven by cusomter demand—demand AVEVA was only too happy to
oblige.
I'd say this announcement, and others like it that will come from the
Spar Point conference this week in Houston, signals the complete acceptance of 3D laser scanning in AEC among those with the most to gain or lose by fast data acquisition. What stops 3D laser scanning from growing beyond use in high-cost capital asset projects is the cost of the hardware, still mostly above $100,000.
Commented Colin Fairweather, Engineering Systems Manager for AMEC and a beta user of AVEVA’s LMI product: “AVEVA’s Laser Modeling Interface has given AMEC a key first-mover advantage in the market and we’ve already seen the benefits of its deployment on a number of projects. It has delivered a quantum leap in overall productivity and significantly improved design processes, quality, and safety.”
LMI is now being launched following a year’s collaboration with the market leading laser modeling vendors—BitWyse, Leica Geosystems HDS, Quantapoint, and Z+F. AVEVA has tightly integrated LMI into PDMS, enabling engineers to directly incorporate point cloud data into PDMS design work. This also means that existing PDMS capabilities like Clash Manager and PDMS Global can be invoked. Any clashes between point cloud data and 3D engineering components in PDMS can not only be identified interactively, they can also be managed and approved explicitly in the Clash Manager module.
AVEVA’s new LMI is available as a separately licensed module of PDMS 11.6 SP2.
Richard Longdon, CEO of AVEVA, said: “Our customers tell us that the time and cost savings achieved using 3D modeling and laser scanning together can amount to up to 10% of the capital expenditure of the whole retrofit project. We have seen the fastest adoption of the technology in the offshore oil and gas, and nuclear power industries, but expect that this technology will rapidly become an indispensable part of most revamp projects.”
--RSN