app for reading P&ID diagrams?

[Antalo15]

Hello everyone.

I am reaching out to seek assistance with a C# Win Forms application project that involves reading P&ID (Piping and Instrumentation Diagram) diagrams. The primary goal of this application is to read the legend associated with the diagram and subsequently identify and analyze all symbols present in the diagram.

I am currently facing challenges in implementing these functionalities and would greatly appreciate your expertise or guidance on how to approach and implement this project effectively.

If you have any insights, code snippets, or recommended libraries that could be useful for handling P&ID diagrams in C# Win Forms applications, I would be very grateful for your assistance.

Thank you in advance for your time and support. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

 

[Skydiver]

The use of WinForms or any other UI framework won't affect how you read the diagram.

Assuming that the diagram is saved in some industry standard, it's just a matter of following the standard's documentation to parse the input file. Chances are there are already libraries that can read (and write) to this format. It'll just be a matter of referencing those libraries in your code.

On the other hand, if the diagram has been generated into an image or PDF, then you will likely have to read the individual pixels out of the image or PDF and then use that pixel data to parse out text annotations, and more importantly, identify the symbols and connections between the symbols. That becomes a much harder problem. If you can find a library that already does this for you again you'll ahead of the game. Otherwise, it could be a potential slog as image recognition and graph inferences can be pretty hard.

 

[cjard]

Never heard of a P&ID, and I suspect I'm not in the minority. You'll have to educate me more to be able to enlist my help. Add some detail to your thread

 

[Skydiver]

Piping and instrumentation diagram - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I only vaguely know about them because my dad worked in an oil refinery and would at times take home designs on large rolls of papers, or he would take me to the refinery's control room and try to explain what the operators are doing and how the relate the diagrams on the walls and the lights around various symbols.

A few years ago when my dad was retiring, he was telling me about the CAD programs his engineers were using to make and edit the diagrams -- and the ensuing chaos because the CAD maker knew their stuff about CADs, but knew nothing about version control. So as the design went through iterations, the engineers needed to know where the modifications were at to be able to compare between printed or on screen diagrams. The software didn't know how to display differences between two diagrams, nor had the capability to overlay one diagram over another to give the engineers half a chance of identifying differences.