Design And Implementation Of Automatic Label Placement Application For Plant Design

3D plant design systems are widely used in the design of power and petrol chemical industry in our country. The 3D model designed by the 3D plant design systems can convert the shape of the three-dimensional model to two-dimensional drawings of the model outline directly, which saved plenty of man hours of drawing the outline. To meet the requirements of construction, layout and measurement, we need to extract the data from the 3D model and generate labels in the drawings. For generating the labels, usually we use a batch generation application to create all the labels automatically. However, if the labels generated automatically are placed in the default position, overlaps happen frequently. We need to move the labels to avoid the overlaps manually. This will cause a lot of man hours when the drawing is complicated and outputs large amounts of the labels.This paper is mainly to solve the problem above. After the labels are generated automatically, our program rearranges the labels in the drawings. The accomplishments of this paper includes, introduction of the technology and achievement of automatic labeling and rearrangement in China and world-widely, analysis of defects in the automatic label placement by AVEVA PDMS, description of both functional and non-functional requirements of this project, and presentation of the architecture design and modules design of this project. The system is consisted of three modules, which are the parameter setting module, the automatic labels rearranged module, and the manual labels rearrangement module. Then these three modules are developed on the AVEVA PDMS 12.1.SP4 platform. And finally the validation tests are carried out.This project is the secondary development on the popular plant design platform AVEVA PDMS, based on its object-oriented program language-the AVEVA Programmable Macro Language (PML). The labels are generated by other label generation applications in the AVEVA PDMS drawings. Our program reads the drawing and fits the labels automatically inside the AVEVA PDMS. The algorithm is achieved by four submodules, which are the conversion of drawing information, the extraction of label dimensions, the label placement calculation, and the adjustment and process. For complex drawings which require manual adjustment, the system offers a manual adjustment module which assists users to refine the outcomes.This system accomplishes the automatic adjustment of labels placement in drawings and improves the defects in automatic label generation system in AVEVA PDMS. With this tool, the drawings can be used for construction without manual adjustment when the drawing is tidy originally. When the drawings are complex and require further examination and adjustment, this tool can reduce the number of labels which needed to adjust manually, so that we can reduce time-consuming manual adjustments, and improve work efficiency.