Adapting CAD models of complex engineering objects to measured point cloud data

Construction, maintenance and retrofitting of complex engineering objects like factories or plants calls for matching their model and actual state that are inevitably different. The paper presents a generic method for tailoring the computer aided design (CAD) model of such objects to their state given in terms of measured 3D, high resolution point clouds. The workflow includes efficient storage of massive measurement data, segmentation of a triangulated mesh-based CAD model into features, matching and adapting the features to the data. The method is demonstrated in a real-world setting, using the CAD model and point cloud data of an industrial plant.