Plate Parts from Panel Brackets

Type standard brackets are always generated individually even if many of them should happen to be identical. However, in a project there are normally a relatively large number of brackets that cannot be set-up as type standard brackets. In AVEVA Marine they may have to be generated as small panels, so called panel brackets as described for example, in the Design Language of Hull Modelling. Panel brackets are normally individual, that means, occurring in one instance only, but they may also be used in several places, even in different assemblies. However, when the plate part is extracted from the panel bracket there is only one part. On the other hand there is a need to have individual occurrences of this bracket part in all situations where it is used, possibly with different position numbers and assembly names and always with different locations.

AVEVA Marine uses in this situation a technique of creating individual almost empty parts for all instances of the panel bracket. These instances contain only some administrative information and a pointer to the plate extracted from the panel bracket itself. Thus these plate parts do not contain any plate geometry themselves and when accessed this information is inherited from the panel bracket plate part pointed to.