Proximity Violation Calculation and Display

Each piece of equipment is checked for four possible spacing violations: inter-plant, intraplant, tank, and access. A spacing violation occurs when the orthogonal distance between two pieces of equipment is less than that stated by the data tables and the Minimum Access Space distance. Because many equipment classes are more detailed than a simple box, PlantWise generates a bounding box that contains all of the equipment’s elements. Similarly, the bounding box for a pipeway section envelops the outer extents of its steel members.

When checking for violations, PlantWise takes the value of the plant_spacing_class for a specific piece of equipment and converts that to a table column name via the spacing-class-mapping file. The three data tables are then checked for the column name gained from the mapping file. For each table that contains the equipment’s spacing class, the distances between that class and all other classes in the table that have instances in the model are compared to the data table minimum spacing values. For any equipment that is not sufficiently spaced away from another, a violation is recorded.

Note: Equipment instances that are sequentially named, regardless of class, will not be checked for violations on the premise that these components are purposely placed with respect to proximity.

EXAMPLE 1 – An air cooler named 0AC-100 would never be checked for proximity violations with any other equipment named 0AC-10x, where x can be any digit.

EXAMPLE 2 – Similarly, AC-100A would never be checked with AC-100z, where z is any letter.

Checking for Violations

To check a layout for spacing violations, you open the Proximity Toggles dialog.

The dialog can be opened from:

the PlantWise Main dialog (Reports > Proximity > Display Toggles...), or
by selecting the Proximity Toggle in the Display Toggles dialog.

For PlantWise to check for proximity violations, you must check the Check Proximity Violations box.

Once that calculation is completed, you can open the details report that lists each of the proximity violations by selecting Reports > Proximity > Detail Report from the PlantWise Main dialog.

Viewing Proximity Violations

Proximity violations are not automatically displayed graphically once they have been calculated. Rather, you choose which violations should be turned on graphically. From the Proximity Toggles dialog, you select which of the four violation types should be shown. Those violations are shown by drawing each equipment instance with a violation on the exception layer of CAD.

Additionally, you can turn on the violation lines which show what type of violation is occurring between two pieces of equipment. For clarity, these lines are drawn from the geometric center of the first object to the geometric center of the second object.

Minimum Access violation lines are drawn in ;
Intra Plant violation lines are shown in ;
Inter Plant violation lines are shown in ; and
Tank Spacing violation lines are shown in .

If you are interested in the proximity violation information of just one violation, clicking on the line of interest after selecting the Edit tool icon on the Plant toolbox opens an Exception List of just the violations between the two equipment instances in question.

Proximity Exceptions

If you have turned on the display of proximity violations, those violations are also reported in the Exception List. Although all proximity violation exceptions are written with one rule, you can adjust the contents of the Exception List by adjusting what type of violations are displayed.