Virtual Web Plant: An Internet-Based Plant Engineering Information System

Abstract

During the development of the European Pressurized Water Reactor Project (EPR)—an innovative design concept for a new type of pressurized water reactor—large amounts of up-to-date engineering data (i.e., CAD data, planning documentation) have to be made available to all international project partners for presentation and development. This paper describes the web-based tool Virtual Web Plant (VWP), a tool to integrate three-dimensional models from various CAD plant design tools and to display them interactively. The user is hereby able to navigate easily through both the plant structure and the project documentation. The work presented in this paper is part of a Virtual Reality Research Project of the Heinz Nixdorf Institute and the Siemens AG KWU.