As part of its ongoing collaboration with customers to identify ways to improve their cabling processes, Cloudis has announced a new development which significantly reduces the time needed for a cable route to be found or for problems to be identified on the most complex cableway networks.
“When the network of cable trays, ladders, penetrations and so on is created in the CAD system and then imported to CMPIC, the completeness and accuracy of that network is unknown,” explains Ian Darbyshire, technical director at Cloudis. “Consequently there may be gaps in the network or inconsistencies in the segregations allocated to the network. When cables are submitted for routing there may be no possible route. Due to the complexity of some of the networks we work with, of up to 40,000 individual pieces of nodal network, it would take minutes to find a route, rather than the time span of a few seconds that we were aiming for.”
Network analysis helps to find faster routes
The enhancement introduced by Cloudis scans the network of trays amd penetrations and finds disconnected areas of the network between which full cable routing will be impossible. Simultaneously, the analysis simplifies the network by identifying dead-end branches. This network analysis allows for an instantaneous decision on whether or not a cable can be routed.
Avoiding dead-end branches reduces the number of options for the autorouter, which in turn allows for a route to be found faster. “As a by-product, the overall routing speed has been increased,” says Darbyshire, “but since we were only looking at a couple of minutes for complex routes and a few seconds for most, this was not really an issue”.
Cloudis sales and commercial director Ian Barnes says: “We have added this enhancement to our suite of integration tools which we continue to develop to help customers improve their cabling processes. Using our API and XML data transfer capabilities as part of one process in CMPIC, we can import the cableways from CAD, check for breaks and inconsistencies and report on them and then run the new enhancement to simplify the network, route the cables, and report on cables where no route has been found. As this process is run in CMPIC, we are also looking for changes to the cableways which affect existing cable routes, for example removed cable trays or those with modified lengths.” CMPIC identifies these modifications and automatically shortens or lengthens the cables accordingly. It also looks for alternative routes for cables whose routes have been broken due to deleted trays.