Wire and Cable manager
General
Cable Manager provides route optimisation functions, for wires and cables.
These functions can:
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Reduce your Cable and Wiring materials estimation error to +/- 5%.
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Automatically route wires and cables via optimum routes (less cable required).
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Report all routing of cables and wires.
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Report all cable and wire lengths.
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Report, for maintenance purposes: Cross-sections of cable raceway in a plant.
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Report: Missing panel duct and raceway segments and routes, redundant segments and routes, devices and panels which are not terminated / fed, raceway which is over filled or under filled etc. (Reducing estimation error and re-work).
Route Optimisation Preparation
Prior to running the Route Optimisation Process on your model, you should prepare the list of items shown below to achieve the best outcome and reduced errors.
Preparation for Ductbank Editing
The ductbank editor can provide a cable cross section of the trench. To achieve this, the cables must be routed through the trench rather than through any ductbank conduits already placed in the trenches. You should tick the option: Hide Ductbank Conduits in the above procedure to force the route optimisation to use the trenches.
Procedure
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Select the Cable Manager entry from the Routing: Wire and Cable menu.
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You will be presented with the Cable Manager Dialog shown below.
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For Routing and Viewing Wires on your Paneldes Model click on the button click on button .
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For Routing and Viewing Cables and advanced features like Waypoint selection, cable modification, cable drawing click on button .
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For viewing a Cable/Wire report, select the report from the list of reports and click on button
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Route Reports
The route optimisation process updates or creates various DBF format report files.
Excel Reports for Navisworks Linking
If you have chosen Generate Excel report for Navisworks linking in Paneldes preferences, then Paneldes will generate a NavisworksLink report. The report will be generated in your current project directory and it can be used to link the Paneldes Bill of Materials report and the Cable Cross-Section report with the entities in Navisworks using the Data-Link. For more information see How to Show Paneldes Data in Navisworks.
See Also
How does the route optimisation function work.
How to Tune Your Model for Wire and Cable Routing.
How to route wires on multiple panel models.
How to View Wire and Cable Routes.
How to Generate Wire and Cable Routes
General
Paneldes provides functions, which can:
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Reduce your Cable and Wiring materials estimation error to +/- 5%.
-
Automatically route wires and cables via optimum routes (less cable required).
-
Report all routing of cables and wires.
-
Report all cable and wire lengths.
-
Report, for maintenance purposes: Cross-sections of cable raceway in a plant.
-
Report: Missing panel duct and raceway segments and routes, redundant segments and routes, devices and panels which are not terminated / fed, raceway which is over filled or under filled etc. (Reducing estimation error and re-work).
See also
This topic describes how to use the route optimisation function. For a description of how the route optimisation function works, see:
If you are have more than one panel drawing in our design, you will need to avoid Paneldes overwriting results when each drawing is routed. See:
How to route wires on multiple panel models
Route Optimisation Preparation
Procedure
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Select the Cable Manager entry from the Routing: Wire and Cable menu.
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You will be presented with the Cable Manager Dialog shown below.
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The Generate/Update reports group, at the top of the dialog, allows you to specify which type of reports you wish to generate. Tick or clear the boxes for Wire and Cable reports as required.
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For Cable reports, you can optionally hide the conduits inside ductbanks.
This generates an estimated cable report that uses only the trench segments on the model, not the conduits within them. The generation of the report can be much faster because potentially many conduits are removed from the analysis.
This option should be used in preparation for ductbank editing, see Preparation for Ductbank Editing, below.
Tick the box Hide Ductbank Conduits to make a faster estimated cable report for ductbank editing.
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For Cable reports, you can control the exclusion of raceway inside panels.
By default, Paneldes removes any raceway that is inside a panel from the analysis.
TIP: If you know that you have not placed any raceway inside any panels then you can remove the tick from this option. This will increase the speed of the route optimisation as the exclusion step is skipped. There will be no difference to the result. Clear the box Exclude raceway in panels to increase speed on pure plant models.
The "exclude raceway in panels" checkbox also causes the router to ignore devices inside those same panels. The cables will route directly to the Panels containing the devices (which is more efficient for speed and memory).
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For both Cable and Wire reports you can choose to ignore certain conductors, leaving their previous routing results untouched in the report. This will enable you to optimise the routes for the part of your design that is contained in this drawing, a partial model. The results of route optimisation for other drawings can be carried forward unmodified in the report.
The following options are available: Ignore internal wires, Ignore external wires and Ignore missing / frozen terminations.
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Generate the selected reports by clicking on the Generate/Update Reports button.
This will run the Route Optimisation function.
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Paneldes may automatically extract data from the drawing file and then suggest connection settings that should be used for routing your model. You should click yes to accept the suggested settings unless you know the settings you have are more accurate.
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You will then be presented with the automatic settings dialog.
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The settings to use for routing are listed on the dialog.
Paneldes can suggest some of these values at your request. See Automatically Suggested Connection Settings.
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If you are routing wires you can choose to optimise the order of the terminations of each wire before routing by ticking the Optimise Wire Lengths tick box.
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You can specify the number of Bottleneck Passes that can be made to highlight any problems in the raceway network.
If you are performing your first routing optimisation then you should set this to a non-zero value, for example the default value is 3.
If you are performing your final routing optimisation then you should set this to zero, 0, so that only valid routes are written to the route reports. When the setting is zero, no bottleneck passes will be made.
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Click the OK button to begin the routing.
If Optimise Wire Lengths is ticked then the wire optimisation procedure will run at this time. When wire optimisation has completed, this procedure will continue.
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If you have previously run the routing you will be offered the option to re-load a cached version of the connected raceways segments.
Calculating the connectivity of the raceway network is time consuming. If neither the model nor the conductor routing preferences have changed, then you can re-use the cached raceway network to save time.
The default option is No, which ensures that the latest raceway model and routing preferences are used.
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When the routing optimisation begins, you will be shown a progress bar, which allows you to cancel the routing at any time.
For each wire or cable that is processed, the progress dialog will show the conductor name and the source and destination panel or device.
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When the routing optimisation has completed, it will display a summary dialog.
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When routing has completed you can view the routing reports and draw the routes that have been generated.
Preparation for Ductbank Editing
The ductbank editor can provide a cable cross section of the trench. To achieve this, the cables must be routed through the trench rather than through any ductbank conduits already placed in the trenches. You should tick the option: Hide Ductbank Conduits in the above procedure to force the route optimisation to use the trenches.
Route Reports
The route optimisation process updates or creates various DBF format report files.
Excel Reports for Navisworks Linking
If you have chosen Generate Excel report for Navisworks linking in Paneldes preferences, then Paneldes will generate a NavisworksLink report. The report will be generated in your current project directory and it can be used to link the Paneldes Bill of Materials report and the Cable Cross-Section report with the entities in Navisworks using the Data-Link. For more information see How to Show Paneldes Data in Navisworks.
After Routing and Optimisation
The route optimisation process will possibly warn you of inefficiency and error in your model. You may have to re-run the route optimisation function several times, as model adjustments are made. This can be thought of as "tuning your model".
How to Tune Your Model for Wire and Cable Routing.
How to route wires on multiple panel models.
Route optimisation errors and warnings
How to use the NEC code to calculate raceway fill for trays and conduits.
How to View Wire and Cable Routes.
How to View Wire and Cable Reports.