General

This document specifies the general principles and ways of working for a utility ("autopos") whose purpose is to automatically set position (piece) numbers in plane panel parts. In doing so the facility usually checks parts for equality and assigns the same position number to identical (within certain limits) parts. All parts that are treated are sorted according to user defined criteria before the numbering process. The position numbers themselves are just running numbers taken from a user defined interval chosen in increasing order.

Furthermore, position numbers can be equipped with a prefix as well as a suffix to indicate certain stages in the design phase. Symmetrical parts, that means, parts in the model valid for both portside and starboard side, can have side specific position numbers, if requested.

Roughly speaking, the scenario of setting position numbers involves the following steps:

1. Setting up of criteria and rules for position number setting including several sets of rules with different options (= cases) which can be used in parallel.

2. Selection of parts within the model to be subject to position number setting.

3. Performing the position number setting.

The main activities in the numbering process are the sorting of the selected parts (according to user defined criteria) and comparison between individual parts for geometrical equality. The same rules for this check are used as in the interactive function for setting/copying position numbers (see below). Step 2 above is said to mean that a scope has to be defined, specifying the parts to be treated within the current session. The term scope means the collection of all parts that are referenced from a set of model objects (blocks, assemblies, ) and that will be treated in one "run".

Parts that may have position numbers are plates, stiffeners, flanges, pillars, brackets, clips (collars), spigot, doubling plates and bracket profiles (includes stiffeners as well as flanges placed on a bracket).

The autopos function is closely related to the Posno function, accessed via the Planar menu of Hull Planar Modelling. This function, among other things, may be used to specify input for an autopos session and also to start a session. It is recommended to consult its documentation in parallel with current one. See Hull, Planar Modelling, Interactive Planar Hull Modelling Functions, Model Generation and View Functions, Pos No.