Visualization of neutral model of ship pipe system using X3D

Abstract

For ship-CAD data exchange among heterogeneous shipbuilding CAD systems such as PDMS and Tribon, and for long-term archiving of data, we define a neutral model for ship pipe model data.

For long-term archiving and for CAD data exchange, we make a pipe-design file using ISO 10303 AP227, where the pipe-design file has information on the location and orientation of piping components. We created a catalogue database for the templates of every piping component in the ship-CAD using ISO 15926 and we built a shape database for the shape of each component and specification files from a model of a commercial shipbuilding CAD system. We refer to these entities as pipe DESIGN file, CATALOGUE Library, SHAPE DB, and SPEC file, and together they comprise a "Neutral Model".

In this situation, the neutral model is distributed in remote locations and local systems, as noted above. As such, it is difficult to check the archived status of specific piping components. Therefore, visualization of the neutral model is mandatory to check the archived status of the pipe model.

In this research we extract pipe model data from a distributed neutral model and visualize the extracted data using X3D, a web based 3D graphics international standard.