A typical Plant may have many active projects at any point in time. Some of these projects may affect unrelated areas of the Plant. However, some projects may overlap in both their scope and their timelines. For example, there may be a long range capital project and a smaller revamp project that both involve changes to some of the same drawings and/or items in the Plant. Another factor to consider is that some projects build on each other. The final design of one project may be the starting point of the next project.
The project features in Smart P&ID can be used to support these types of concurrent engineering activities. For unrelated projects, the basic fetch/check out and merge/check in operations allow the facility model to be updated in a controlled fashion. For overlapping projects, the basic fetch and merge operations combined with the object-level claim and the compare and refresh operations allow the user to resolve all conflicts. The ability to fetch drawings not only from the Plant but also from other projects allows users to build on the current work being done in other projects.