A study on scan data matching for reverse engineering of pipes in plant construction

The domestic plant construction market is in a prosperous condition, due to the uprising demand for industry facility and infrastructure, triggered by the oil price rise in Middle East Asia. It is difficult, however, to survive in competition with advanced foreign construction companies, because domestic companies rely heavily on labor-intensive construction conventions in AEC(Architectural, Engineering and Construction industry). In particular, the piping work in a plant construction project accounts for many portions of the critical paths, from the viewpoint of process control. Although plant construction projects need to deal with complex three-dimensional piping information, most domestic companies rely on two-dimensional CAD drawings for construction and quality control, which frequently leads to significant problems, such as construction delay, and productivity decrease. For such reasons, it is problematic, in that the build ability, workability, and productivity of projects are dependent on the workers’ abilities to understand drawings and their technical skill. In other words, as plant construction projects are getting more complicated in details, and more increased in size, it is urgently needed to develop an efficient information management methodology, in order to figure out heterogeneous 3D piping information in a real-time manner. Reverse engineering for obtaining 3D shape information using a 3D laser scanner is used, in order to extract drawing information from constructed objects. In particular, as piping works control the Critical Path (CP) in the plant construction project, in this study, a reverse engineering algorithm is proposed, which can measure the preciseness of pipes, by comparing the 3D CAD model and the 3D shape information obtained from a laser scanner. Applying the algorithm can contribute to re-construction prevention and quality control in the construction process.