I am new in this forum and I have no experience with PDMS at all. I have been using AutoCAD Plant 3D for 5 months and during that time I have been very dissatisfied with it and have started to do research on other plant desing softwares.
Could anyone, who has experience with both programs, tell me, what are the major principal differences between them? And how often does it happen in PDMS that some function or feature of the program won't work the way is should (and the problem is related to faulty program rather than user's low skill)? In Plant 3D, it happens a lot and this is annoying.
And how expensive is the PDMS? Maybe compared to Plant 3D... price of PDMS = x times price of Plant 3D...
AutoCAD Plant 3D is a very new product, which is probably why it's very faulty. Whereas AVEVA PDMS is over 40 years old and has been proven itself over and over again on many diverse projects. AP3D is a file based system, are you are limited to the size of the project you can work on. AVEVA PDMS is database, object-oriented software, and can be used on the biggest to smallest projects. AVEVA PDMS has built-in clash detection, with AP3D you need Navisworks for clash detection.
AVEVA PDMS is more expensive than AP3D, but more powerful and less buggy.
Only two parts pre-date 1972: the GINO-F graphics library and *** Newell's automatic routing algorithm, which may have been proof of concept code by then. Coding of the actual PDMS product started in 1974 and it was early 1975 before there was anything to show to non-programmers. So "nearly 40 years old" is more accurate ;-)
Just how much of that 1970s' code is left I wonder?
Some very old code is still included - it is not easy to tell exactly how much
The old stuff will all be Fortran, so I suppose that eliminates most of the current code-base. There was also some Primos assembler IIRC, but unless Intel are emulating that somehow I don't expect it's survived.
One part done in 1975/6 that may have survived is the pipe and component catalogs I did for the most commonly used sections of B.S. and A.N.S.I. standards. The dimensions won't have changed since then (I think?), so the original numbers may still be in there somewhere.
I am a PDMS consultant and was also part of some of the beta teams for Autodesk during the first releases of AP3D. It really is an apple and oranges comparison. When it comes to plant design software there are two categories in my opinion. There is the small plant, low cost, low admin level no frill software which consists of AP3D, AutoPlant, OpenPlant, PlantSpace, and Cadworx. Then there is the total packages for all projects which can do everything cradle to grave as far as integrated DMS and PLM solutions. These primarily consist of PDS, SP3D and PDMS. It is hard to really do a comparison on those two, it primarily comes down to what you want to do with the software and what is your current workforce. I hope this helps and if you have any further questions I would be glad to help.
