A Symbolic Approach to the Fast Design of Industrial Piping Systems

This paper describes a new approach to the interactive design of industrial piping systems which is vastly faster and more responsive to a designer's actions. In the new approach, rather than attempting to model the piping system components as either polyhedral or quadric-surfaced solids, the piping components are represented symbolically in an isometric projection plane. The approach exploits the high degree of regularities inherent in piping system components and structures, and makes it possible to develop extremely fast algorithms for interactively designing a three-dimensional piping system, to subject it to transformations, to test it for interference, and to generate visible-line-only displays.