Reducing human effort in engineering drawing validation.

Abstract

Oil & Gas facilities are extremely huge and have complex industrial structures that are documented using thousands of printed sheets. During the last years, it has been a tendency to migrate these paper sheets towards a digital environment, with the final end of regenerating the original computer-aided design (CAD) projects which are useful to visualise and analyse these facilities through diverse computer applications. Usually, this was done manually by re-sketching each page using CAD applications. Nevertheless, some applications have appeared which generate the CAD document automatically given the paper sheets. In this last case, the final document is always verified by an engineer due to the need of being a zero-error process. Since the need of an engineer is absolutely accepted, we present a new method to reduce the required engineer working time. This is done by highlighting the digitised components in the CAD document that the automatic method could have incorrectly identified. Thus, the engineer is required only to look at these components. The experimental section shows our method achieves a reduction of approximately 40% of the human effort keeping a zero-error process