Structure Fabrication Engineer for Marine

The DELMIA 3DEXPERIENCE Structure Fabrication Engineer for Marine (PSFEM) is a rich design-to-manufacturing application that manages the work preparation for (steel) structure design data and fasteners (weld items).

It provides manufacturing engineers a 3D-based platform to prepare fabrication data in close collaboration with design and product engineers. Using customizable user-defined features (UDFs), ‘Power Copy’ mechanisms and business rules utilizing Engineering Knowledge Language (EKL), the software automatically computes manufacturing features based on feature recognition and PLM attributes on the design data.

Manufacturing features such as Marking Lines (attachment, alignment & reference lines) are needed to describe the fabrication data and the transformation from the raw panels/plates and profiles to the final design parts and assemblies. Once the preparation is completed, PSFEM creates production documentation for the yard. This includes production drawings (based on templates), machine data for plate cutting and profiling machines in a generic XML format, and job order data to feed nesting machines (ALMA).

DELMIA Marine Assembly

Structure Fabrication Engineer for Marine Benefits

Easy creation of structure fabrication data & deliverables based on design definition & business rules

PSFEM is an efficient, 3D model-based transparent solution leveraging both powerful 3D visualization tools and alphanumeric information to (semi-) automatically manage structure work preparation for large marine products. Business rule integration provides the means to tailor what is produced and automates the generation of lightweight wireframe models for the production fabrication data.

This includes manufacturing features such as Outer Contour, Marking Lines (attachment, alignment & reference lines), Edge Preparation, Margin, Fit-Up, Shrinkage Compensation. This follows feature recognition and attribute definitions on the Engineering Item Structure (Product Design data) for panels, plates, stiffeners, and the structure fastener objects connecting them. This automation helps to minimize errors that could happen in a purely manual process. For cases in which user interaction is required, well-designed UI capabilities are available for the manual adjustment of the pre-computed data.

Early detection of issues in a collaborative business process from Design to Manufacturing saves time and money

PSFEM improves preparation quality and reduces the overall time that would have to be spent in the yard to fix production problems not discovered earlier in the virtual world.

CATIA Drafting for Marine

Structure Fabrication Engineer Highlights

Manufacturing item structure management for all marine and offshore manufacturing disciplines.

PSFEM enables manufacturing engineers to author the assembly structure, create assembly drawings and prepare the basis for downstream business processes. Authoring the assembly structure involves which components are assembled in the pre-outfitting of blocks and sections, and which ones are assembled in final outfitting stages, independent of how the Engineering Item Structure is organized. The user can decide which parts to purchase and which assemblies and parts to make. If the Engineering structure contains fasteners (typically the case for Structure Design Data), when generating the MBOM, corresponding fasten items are created as well.

Unique 3D immersive multi-view user interface

PSFEM provides various UI elements to perform the job on thousands of objects. Among those UI elements: A grid view (3-dimensional PERT-like chart) to illustrate the assembly composition with 3D representations displayed on tiles, a classical tree view and a smart-tool auxiliary viewer with a corresponding part list with plenty of possibilities to visualize what is already planned versus what has not been planned.

User interface and business logic customization for authoring, navigation and output

PSFEM’s open architecture provides the ability to customize the authoring, data navigation and output documents according to the company’s needs. The invocation of business rules for aggregation, assignment and naming, makes it possible to automate the creation of the Manufacturing Item Structure.

Generation of the detailed structure for manufactured parts (piece-parts) and fastener items (weld items)

Panels, plates, profiles and structure fasteners from the Structure Design data are “translated” into corresponding Manufacturing Item objects of the manufacturing BOM. These objects are not duplicates of the design data, but connected via traceability links to their design counterparts and will be further enriched with additional manufacturing information. These Manufacturing Items can the automatically linked to computed fabrication and fastening operations with corresponding durations and sequences in process planning to downstream Process Engineering roles.

Automatically update in-process models (IPM)

The Update IPM command generates the manufacturing features such as outer contour and marking lines and additional 3D annotations using catalogs of user-defined features. This approach provides rich customization capabilities and flexibility for creating the right output data for the yard. Thanks to user preferences and rules, you can analyze which features and annotations are created directly during Update IPM or in a later stage when creating production drawings and XML data.

Interactive modifications of manufacturing features

Intelligent tools embedded in the Auxiliary Viewer allow work preparers to review the manufacturing features and modify them individually on demand (both single and multi-edits if applicable).

Integrated applications to manage model – based 3D Tolerances and Annotations

PSFEM delivers applications to manage and optimize 3D Tolerances and annotations directly on the engineering model which are then reported later on production deliverables. This eliminates work to generate and update 2D documents to the 3D geometry definition

• Increases the quality of manufactured products with less tolerancing and drawing interpretation errors
• Natural path from 2D definition to a full 3D definition
• Directly feeds downstream applications such as manufacturing & work instructions

Management of one common resulting product and deliverables for identical parts

During the detailed structural design, some of the computed piece parts may be identical, both geometrically and materially. This typically happens for profiles and brackets. Identical Partswith the same Position Number are differentiated in PSFEM.  The software will manage only one common Resulting Product with manufacturing features, common flattened/straightened parts for curved/bent objects, as well as the common output documents for one ‘master’ part.

Review fabricated product details when needed

The Open Output Product command allows users to display or modify manufacturing parts during the preparation process. The user can inspect the features of design parts in their final state or at any stage of a feature’s manufacturing process, from design to manufacturing. Each state of the part, e.g. the wireframe model of a flattened plate, is reviewed separately.

Management of plate flattening and inverse bending curves

Includes algorithms to perform plate flattening and computation of inverse bending curves for curved profiles.

Shrinkage Compensation

Metal inevitably shrinks in the welding process. PSFEM considers this in the size computation for the cutting of plates and profiles. It is computed based on ratio and takes into account shrinkage per number of stiffeners, which may also depend on the material and thickness. The parameters are defined in a shrinkage table managed in Data Setup (Project Resources).

Automatic generation of piece-part workshop documents

Includes the ability to generate 2D drawings and workshop documents automatically from the model, including plate fabrication sketches, profile broken-view drawings with end cut information, and separated bevel views as well as XML documents.

Integrated application to manage complex multi-discipline drawings

In addition to auto-generated piece-part drawings based on standard drafting application, PSFEM delivers functions to generate complex drawings with extended capabilities

• Parametric annotations dedicated to Heavy Industry with smart positioning
• Multi-view generation and update based on template and rules
• Color-filling functionalities
• Dedicated Bill of Material and template reports
• Batch mode (credit-based) with embedded 800 credits

Batch Modes

Update IPM and creation of deliverables are accessible through batch commands. This means the user can assign time-consuming tasks in parallel with other tasks to perform simultaneously, or run the batch overnight.

Flexible generation of reports from alphanumerical + 2D PLM data stored in the platform

Report Producer is a powerful platform service that generates reports such as BOMs, checklists, instructions, etc. in multiple formats (Word, RTF, Excel, PDF, HTML, XML, CSV). Report Producer generates documents based on templates administrated by Report Template Designer (not part of this role).

Manufacturing Context Building (Session Building)

When dealing with large data sets in the Marine & Offshore industry, a proper manufacturing context is built. A reduced data set is selected in order to limit the number of objects loaded into the authoring session. This mechanism is called session building. Session building is performed in the Manufacturing Context Builder (MCB), an application that is available in all authoring roles. MCB comes with powerful filtering capabilities (attribute, volume, configuration) and viewing functions based on light representations. Additionally, you can find linked objects through various relationships and load the objects consistently into the authoring session. This concept is called Smart Completion. Moreover, users can define recipes to combine filters, tree expansion, navigation and completion. This is User-Defined completion or User-Defined Open, depending on where the completion is being performed (client or server side)

 Issue Management

This generic command for all roles in Digital Manufacturing allows the reporting of issues against the objects managed in this role. The issues are stored on the platform and hence easily shared with all collaborators.