CONCEPTUAL PLANT LAYOUT

Plant layout involves the spatial arrangement of equipment within the steel structure or building of a pint and considers the inter-connecti ons through pipes and ducts as well as walks and vehicle transportatio n. An optimal layout has to ensure operability, adequete safety and an economic design. Therefore it is influenced by a whole range of facto rs such as process needs,maintenance, operational requirements, safety considerations and the available site. The resulting parameters diffe r significantly and compete with one another. Moreover, the convention al sequential work now of layout and detail engineering does not allow improvements of the layout at a late state of the project Today comme rcial CAD-systems are used as design tools for plant layout and detail engineering, but they do-not support planning and optimization of the layout. These decisions still need to be made by experienced senior e ngineers and designers. At the University of Dortmund new methods and software tools have been developed for conceptual plant layout. They a re based on heuristic rules, statistical data and new algorithms for t he spatial arrangement of equipment as well as pipe routing. The layou t is calculated on the basis of process flow diagrams, process conditi ons, equipment design and further constraints related to the project A ny change in these constraints alters the layout. Since the pipe routi ng is also calculated for a given layout, it becomes possible to ident ify areas where the layout or specific pipes should be changed in orde r to arrive at the most economic design. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd . All rights reserved.