Building your diagrams

Trace Plant Designer has been developed on the basis of a very intuitive Human/Machine interface in order to increase your productivity. Its ease-of-use in usual tasks is evident after a few minutes of work. Some details - as ordering symbols by frequency of use or implementing Drag & Drop in many ways - demonstrates the special attention given to the user's work simplification.

Blocks and Symbols

Conceiving and drawing your diagrams is highly assisted, graphic objects you have to deal with are "fair", their comportment is controlled by the program.

Block insertion : Inserting a block is a dynamic, Drag & Drop and fair feature; the block is automatically aligned with the line below it. You can change the fluid direction by a simple right-click by changing the X-axis and Y-axis mirrors. Automatic line-break : Instant graphic actualisation of a circuit when you add, delete or move a block using any AutoCAD way. Vessel/Tank/Furnace definition : Description of such items has been made particularly easy by selecting graphic components. Further insertions of these parts and their nozzles are really fast and powerful.

Circuit elaboration

The same approach in power and quality stands for circuit definition :
Process lines hierarchy (Major, minor, utilities,…).
Fair reactive line-break at circuit intersections.
Fluid direction control, detection of FROM/TO connections and data propagation.
Trace Plant Designer helps to make consistent P&IDs by controlling input data against others and by propagating them along a complete circuit, including from or to another diagram.

Project management

Trace Plant Designer offers you a powerful Project manager allowing you :
- To define your users' roles and to grant them various access rights.
- To access your documents across a tree-structure in which you can get : external documents such spreadsheets or word processor ones and integration to a PDM software already in usage in your company

The restricted access by login ensures the confidentiality of your data and helps in controlling special actions such "Increasing Revision", "Closing a Revision", "Archiving a project", "Approbation", "Creation of new blocks", etc…

Trace Plant Designer can be easily connected to your PDM or ERP software.

The tree-view of the various documents belonging to a project gives you an easy and natural way to access to any information. You can store documents of any kind (Word, Excel, etc…), a real advantage when archiving or transmitting a project to your sub-contractors.

Technical data management

Trace Plant Designer has been conceived to give you easy connections to other data sources used in your company and to be able to link external information with our own technical database.

Modification can be made to the structure of delivered families (Lines, instruments, pumps, exchangers, vessels, tanks, furnaces, air-coolers, valves).
You can create your own equipment families
Very opened management of technical data : You can create your own application.

Trace Plant Designer imports projects from AutoPLANT © *.

With Trace Plant Designer, the reference in Plant Design for AutoCAD, you can now import projects designed with AutoPLANT © and convert them into Trace Plant Designer projects.
Further than getting drawings and symbols from AutoPLANT ©, Trace Plant Designer also imports complete database information: line tag, pipe diameter, equipment technical data...

(*) © AutoPLANT is a registered trademark