State-of-Practice on As-Is Modelling of Industrial Facilities

90% of the time needed for the conversion from point clouds to 3D models of industrial facilities is spent on geometric modelling due to the sheer number of Industrial Objects ( IOs) of each plant. Hence, cost reduction is only possible by automating modelling. Our previous work has successfully identified the most frequent industrial objects which are in descending order: electrical conduit, straight pipes, circular hollow sections, elbows, channels, solid bars, I-beams, angles, flanges and valves. We modelled those on a state-of-the-art software, EdgeWise and then evaluated the performance of this software for pipeline and structural modelling. The modelling of pipelines is summarized in three basic steps: ( a) automated extraction of cylinders, ( b) their semantic classification and ( c) manual extraction and editing of pipes. The results showed that cylinders are modelled with 75% recall and 62% precision on average. We discovered that pipes, electrical conduit and circular hollow sections require 80% of the Total Modelling Hours ( TMH) of the 10 most frequent IOs to build the plant model. TMH was then compared to modelling hours in Revit and showed that 67% of pipe modelling time is saved by EdgeWise. This paper is the first to evaluate state-of-the-art industrial modelling software. These findings help in better understanding the problem and serve as the foundation for researchers who are interested in solving it.