Software development of a catalogue of engineering symbols as an add-on facility for use in CAD

Abstract

Production of engineering drawings have evolved from manual to Computer Aided Design (CAD), primarily for the speed and accuracy presented by CAD. Unlike modelling and simulation packages that are equipped with building blocks, CAD packages are generally supplied with no pre-drawn symbols. From best practices in industrial engineering and working for companies that make use of CAD systems, evidently a lot of time is spent in repetitive tasks in the development of engineering drawings. An industrial engineering approach was adopted in this research where programming was used as a separate process from any specific application to an organization through the creation of a catalogue of almost 500 commonly used engineering symbols and storing them in a database, coupled with an add-on facility for AutoCAD for easy retrieval, aimed at avoiding these repetitive tasks, hence facilitating the rapid production of drawings to improve productivity and efficiency when using CAD systems.