AutoCAD Plant 3D 2020 – P&ID – Multiple Design Options in 1 Project

By Andy Davis

If you routinely start a new P&ID project by selecting from a collection of standard designs, you may not be aware that you can store multiple design options within the same template project.

Let us consider the very simple case of having three standard pump sets to choose from, consisting of 1, 2 or 3 pumps respectively.

In each case, we want to retain the same tags for the pumps and associated valves. For example, HV-001 and CV-002 are always associated with pump P-001.

In our template project, we can create a separate drawing for each option, and assign the same tags to the symbols in each drawing. See below.

When we duplicate a tag, we will be warned that it has already been assigned to another component in a different drawing. However, this is not a problem.

We must first ensure that we have all the drawings that contain a reference to the duplicate tag open with write access and then we can choose the option to assign the tag to the selected component. The new component will then share the same data record as the existing tagged component(s) in our template project.

To copy one of the pump options into a live project, we use the Copy Drawing to Project… option from the Project Manager window.

The copied drawing is added to the new project with the original tags retained.

This approach enables us to create multiple design options within the same template project and retain consistent tagging across all the options.  As we will only copy one of the options into a new project, we do not need to worry about the shared data records in the template project.