Grouping of Wires into Cables (Trunking) and Wire Numbers and Core Numbers, plus extensions to allow modelling of industrial plant

[anythingwithawire]

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This is not about a problem, more a suggestion of how close you are to dominating a similar related field of design for industrial plant, systems and sub-systems, up to the largest scale.

This could be so much more with minor additions - it is possible to represent and design an entire electrical, instrumentation or communications system with this ported node graph modelling if a few small changes additions are made. Then an entire Iron Ore Mine or LNG Gas Plant can be modeled for design and construction. I know because for many years I used an in house product based on similar premise, but with the worst UI in the world. This could be so much better.

First thing is sometimes you connect parts with a cable, which is a group of wires that are "trunked" by grouping them all in one sheath. Additionally there may be screens for cables, or pairs of cables, so you need a way to define a connector "type" similar to a part "type", because that way you also have somewhere for spare or yet to be connected cores and screens.

Then you need to decide how to represent a cable that is maybe not connected to anything yet, and how you access the cores for connection, but a number of options exist, but basically it looks likely best is route cable to arbitrary endpoints and then click on an endpoint for a popup window to appear showing core ends similar to terminals on a part.

Whether in a cable or as an individual wire, construction in an industrial panel usually has wiremarkers so the wire can be uniquely identified with in the panel and/or referenced back to the drawing. So the wires need names.

When in a cable, the wires still may have name as above, but the wire also has a core identifier, which maybe a number (eg 1-20) or it maybe a color (eg red, blue etc), or it may be a combo eg in a twisted pair cable where the pairs are black and white, eg 1W, !B, 2W, 2B etc etc.

In this it is more or less assumed all parts are located on the same circuit board, or a sub-assembly of circuit boards. But you might have boards, inside boxes, inside enclosures, inside rooms, inside areas, inside plants, inside countries, inside the world, all interconnected. So this all also implies all parts have a location, which if considered as a hierarchy/fold type arrangement defines if a cable (or wire in some cases) leaves an enclosure (panel or box) or some kind through a penetration (gland, typically, but can be a Hawk Block, grommet, or can just be a hole in the box or panel). Then a way to manage location on a tree structure, with drag and drop, copy/paste (clone) etc becomes obvious.

Then, all parts might have attributes, which can be user defined, but typically there default attributes related to location, but all attributes my be inherited, or over-ridden at the level of the part (and therefore all it's children).

it would be nice if an attribute might be or have an attached file, eg a pdf copy of the datasheet or manual, or specification. A library manager of documents might then be a side tool as well, I don't go into that here.

Once you have such a hierarchy with inheritance available for location, it becomes semi obvious that all the parts could also benefit from such an arrangement, but based around "type".

This gives you the primary keys in a tree type graph with inheritance and overriding of "type" and "location" for any given object, but you might like to group objects based on certain common attributes arbitrarily for other reasons, eg you could have an attribute defined by the user "delivery date", and then form a group based on all objects with delivery date after a certain date. Then you would to be able at least list all the objects int he group, along with all their attributes, then you can make reports. this is powerful as it allows users to manage their objects in arbitrary ways to set up data and reporting systems that apply to the whole project and might include time based aspects for planning and scheduling and so on.

If all this is available, then it is possible to design and manage the creation of industrial plant and equipment ranging up to the largest projects ever constructed, projects worth tens of billions of dollars that take a decade or more to design and construct at times, and that is just considering a static design. With the features already existing here it would be possible to do modelling and design of a dynamic basis in a way of which I am fairly certain nothing even close exists to day, all products I am aware of on the market that can do what is needed to do such designs only cater for the needed level of detail for a static design, if that, and quite poorly in many ways.

If a model could be created and connected to another model that simulated the process (real world) then you can simulate your plant and start considering design to a level of fidelity previously unheard of, potentially servicing some of the biggest companies int he world that already spend tens and hundreds of millions to do design in a manner and detail far less accomplished than what this could do.

There are some slightly estoric aspects I don't go into, such as virtual signals, eg signals trunked by serial link like ethernet or rs232 (or profibus or modbus, or OPC-UA), but these require nothing really different that what I have described already.

And you might twist this to pnuematics and hydraulics, either specifically, or part of a greater model, but with everything I describe you can almost do this just by how you name and/or group types, if you wanted.

So maybe it is too much of a change form your current core mission, maybe a fork to a different product with a different target audience would be better, but you have some much of the fundamentals here in a nice to use UI, it is so close to being suitable for use for this use I describe for the largest oil and gas and mining enterprises in the world that I don't think you have a lot of work to easily and totally out-compete the currently best available solutions.