Addin value to CAD

In the early days of computer aided design (cad), it was often said: "CAD is just too expensive to use it as a drawing board." Driven by the growing demands and higher expectations of the building industry, this statement seems to be topical once again.

The need for high quality, well integrated documentation has become more and more pressing and the limitations of pure cad systems have become increasingly apparent. Today's construction industry, particularly the electrical installation sector, demands the kind of transparency and flexibility that goes way beyond traditional cad offerings. In addition to this, the two current big trends – facilities management and 3D – can obviously not be addressed by standard drafting packages without a specialised and well integrated application. elcoCAD R4 is one such solution. Currently it is the market leader in german-speaking Europe – a UK version is now available.

So what kind of functionality is offered by such a system? It provides all the necessary symbols and drawing functions, for example automatic positioning, alignment of luminaires, loudspeakers, automatic creation of cable containments in 2D and 3D, and an automatically generated drawing legend. More than that, elcoCAD R4 includes a project and drawing management facility, and has the ability to automatically transfer relevant drawing data, like title, indices, approval status etc into a dwg-file. All of this is a vast improvement on the standard drawing board.

Interfaces to cae tools
As with many existing tools, computer aideed engineering (cae) functionality is provided partly by built-in modules and partly using interfaces to existing industry standard software packages. For lighting calculations, elcoCAD R4 comes with bidirectional interfaces to the two very popular products DIALux and RELUX. In elcoCAD R4, the shape of the room is transferred from the floor plan to the lighting calculation system, and the exact position of the calculated luminaires, including their 3D-co-ordinates, dimensions and load are automatically transferred back to the floor plan.

The system supports ETS/2, the official software package for European Installation Bus (EIB) technology by including data exports of all EIB-items, including software address, location and application data. Microsoft Word and Excel are used for the creation of lists and reports and a configurable Excel import module is included for importing specification sheets into elcoCAD's project database.

EPI is a bidirectional interface that allows data exchange with software packages for electrical calculations (BS 7671) for protection, cable, discrimination etc. If you need to create circuit diagrams, elcoCAD R4 is shipped with an interface to ePLAN 5 and other packages for electrical control diagrams. Circuit information is automatically generated from the electrical installation extracted from the floor plans.

For fire protection systems, the system provides calculation and visualisation of detectors (BS 5839), automatically generates block diagrams, cable lists, detector lists etc.

Cable support systems, such as trunking systems, conduits etc can be generated automatically in 2D and 3D using the powerful elcoCAD info line technology, which also supports BESA terms and other algorithms for dimensioning the containments.

A big issue in electrical installation engineering is cable routing. An important part of the system's philosophy is 'stepwise refinement', which enables the user to add information at various levels of detail as the project progresses. For example, the built-in cable manager allows the user to define the basic structure of distribution boards and circuits. In the first step the user selects the required devices by simply clicking on them, thus connecting them into the desired circuit. Cable length, the number of devices on the circuit and the cumulated load are displayed online and can be checked against user-defined maximum values.

Having defined these basic structures, the system now has enough information to generate all the output mentioned above. If it is necessary to document the exact cable routes or get precise cable and conduit quantities, there is a function to draw 2D/3D polylines and link them to the cable manager. The system offers an optimised algorithm for finding the shortest connection between two points. This supports networks with loops as well as user-defined redirection, where a specific connection is disallowed.

The software is prepared for all common cable systems (power engineering and communications), while other systems can be configured manually. Because of its flexible design, elcoCAD R4 can be adapted to nearly any kind of requirement – this flexibility is a very important issue. An estimated 80% of the design process in the building industry involves altering completed work. elcoCAD caters for such evolutionary change by dynamically updating the online database; adjusting length or location changes automatically, whenever the user moves a socket, luminaire or cable.

3D
Unlike any other industry, construction has a tendency to resolve problems on site, which can result in increasing co-ordination costs. This is why 3D is such a big trend in the cad environment and clash detection has become such a hot topic. Unfortunately 3D-modelling can be a very time-consuming and expensive technique.

While the user is working strictly in 2D, elcoCAD R4 will generate a complete 3D model in the background that can be used for wall elevations and 3D analysis. A new interface to NavisWorks 3 can be invoked for sophisticated visualisation, walk-throughs and automatic clash detection.

High-end cad system can also help to achieve cost transparency and control. elcoCAD R4 uses it's online object database to keep track of all quantities that are added to the cad drawings. These quantities can be handed over to Excel to generate a bill of material at any given time, without even having to save the current dwg file. Quantities can also be linked to specification sheets in a 1:n relation. If the specification sheets carry information about unit rates, costs and time the system will multiply these values with the cad quantities and provide reports that support cost estimation as well as plan/actual comparisons.

Compatibility is a key feature in the AEC environment. At elcoSystems, we believe that the issue of compatibility cannot be addressed except through new cad standards like IFC. As long as the de facto standard for drawing exchange is dxf/dwg, users will face some imminent system problems and these problems need to be solved.

DXF/DWG files most commonly contain basic geometric primitives, but no objects. If the user wants to reuse electrical installation symbols there are two choices: abandon the option of using a high-end cad system or do all the drawing work once again. Both options are simply unacceptable.

elcoCAD's click and learn modules are based on elcoCAD cognitive object technology (ECOT), and are able to learn a new symbol by just one mouse click. All symbols of that same type can then be automatically transformed into elcoCAD objects in the current or any other drawing, without changing the original geometry.

The new symbol library created by learning the symbols on one occasion can then be used to produce drawings in this cad standard (layers, colours, symbols etc). Considering the increasing compatibility demands that arise from facilities management cad specifications, this is a hugely beneficial feature of click and learn technology.