Drawings — Shipbuilding · Heavy Industry · Plant · Defense

For shipbuilding, heavy industry, plant, and defense sites, the drawing is the authoritative record for the work. This page collects the ways foremen, quality, and design staff ask AI questions against drawings. The upper sections are what works now; the bottom is planned — do not mix the two.

An admin must enable this first

Drawing collection is off by default. Once an admin turns on DRAWING_INGEST_ENABLED in rag-api and drawings are uploaded, this becomes usable (Configuration).

• Accepted formats — DXF and vector PDF. PDFs exported from CAD must be tagged as "drawing" at upload time (the admin console's Upload Drawing always tags PDFs as "drawing" from the start).
• Drawings in the platform ledger — DXF files attached to equipment in the platform, and PDFs whose "document type" is drawing, come in via automatic sync. These drawings are edited and deleted on the platform side — the RAG side refuses to overwrite or delete them.
• Unsupported formats — DWG is not accepted. Export to DXF or PDF before uploading. Scanned drawings (image PDFs) cannot be read yet.
• What is read — the title block (drawing number, part number, material, revision, scale), dimensions and tolerances, the parts list (BOM), notes, and the border zone grid are indexed together with their location.
• Preview — a per-page preview is generated at upload time. For PDF this is a grayscale image (PNG); for DXF it is SVG. This is used by the drawing card in Ask, the drawing view in the right panel, the drawing viewer in a new tab, and revision comparison. Drawings uploaded before the preview feature existed must be re-uploaded to get previews.
• Where it lives — drawing originals and indexes stay entirely within the customer's own servers. There are no outbound calls, so this works as-is on air-gapped networks.

Foreman — Checking a drawing before starting work

• Who Assembly / welding / machining foremen
• When After receiving a work order, before starting work
• Ask like this "What's the material and revision for drawing number DWG-GT-2871-104?"
• You get The material and revision from the title block. The title block with an exact match on drawing number is attached as the top citation; clicking the card opens that drawing page in the right panel with the title block location highlighted. You can flip pages and zoom within the panel, or use Open in Viewer (new tab) in the header for a larger view. Cards carry a revision badge (✓ latest revision · ⚠ older revision · ⏳ change in progress · ? revision unverifiable).
• Note The revision badge is a determination the Digital Thread reads from PLM. Without a PLM connector it is always "revision unverifiable," which does not mean it is the latest revision. → Asking with Drawings

Foreman — Asking Go/No-Go on whether the shop-floor drawing is the latest revision

• Who Assembly / welding / machining foremen
• When Before handing off shift work
• Ask like this On an installation with Digital Thread connected, ask in Ask: "Check whether this work drawing is the latest revision," or "What work is scheduled today? Tell me what's blocked first."
• You get A "Drawing" Go/No-Go item per process — whether an engineering change against the part number used by that process blocks the work, and whether the drawing on the shop floor is the PLM-approved revision. If only an older revision is present, it's No-Go; if the effective date of the new revision has already passed, it's No-Go; if it hasn't passed yet, it's At Risk (new-revision parts/drawing arrival on the shop floor still needs confirming). The answer to "what's scheduled today" also lists the drawing and revision each process should use.
• Note There is no dedicated screen showing work readiness — you ask via Ask. MES and PLM connectors must be connected. Without PLM it reads "unknown." If the shop-floor drawing isn't in the Digital Thread (i.e., not uploaded), the drawing-revision check is skipped and only engineering changes are shown. The per-process work readiness tool is on from the start (2026.10 re-release (2026-10-20)). → Digital Thread · MCP Tool Map

Design/Quality — Seeing what changed between revisions

• Who Design / manufacturing engineering / quality staff
• When A new revision is issued following an engineering change
• Ask like this With both revisions uploaded, ask so that both revisions are cited together, e.g. "Show me drawing BLD-SX-S1 revision C and revision D," then click the card to open the right panel and press Compare with latest revision (or Compare with previous revision if you're viewing the latest). The Drawing Viewer opens in a new tab comparing the two revisions.
• You get In the viewer, view the two revisions side by side (synced panning) or overlaid (drag a divider line), and use Highlight changes to see the changed regions by color (added green, removed red, modified orange). The "Changes" list covers summary, title block, dimensions, parts list, and notes changes, plus "parts not comparable / cautions"; clicking a row jumps to that location. Switch revisions via "Viewing revision" / "Compare" above the viewer.
• Note The button only appears if the same citation set contains another revision of the same drawing number. If the revision notation scheme differs (e.g. C vs 03), ordering cannot be determined and the button won't appear. Scanned pages are not compared; comparing DXF against PDF compares structure only. If the two revisions cannot be aligned and overlaid, changed regions aren't drawn — only the list is shown. If a comparison result can't be produced, a reason is given and only side-by-side viewing of the two revisions is available.

Design/Quality — Zooming in on the viewer and asking about a specific spot

• Who Design / quality / foremen
• When The panel preview is too small to see the whole drawing, or you need to ask about a specific part of the drawing
• Ask like this Click Open in Viewer (new tab) on the drawing card or in the panel header. In the viewer, turn on Select region to ask, drag over the drawing to select a region, then press Ask about this region.
• You get A new tab opens with just the drawing, enlarged — zoom with wheel / + / -, pan by dragging, Fit page / Fit width / Actual size (100%), a page list on the left, and PgUp/PgDn to flip pages. It opens with the location the answer pointed to already marked. Pressing "Ask about this region" fills the Ask input with a sentence naming the drawing, page, and region plus an image of that region, so you can add your question and send it.
• Note View permission, scope, and document classification are re-checked by the server on every open — a drawing you can't open shows a reason, not a blank screen. For confidential/controlled drawings, no region image is attached — only text. The viewer has no dimension measuring, annotation saving, or original download. → Asking with Drawings

Quality — Finding where a tolerance is located on a drawing

• Who Quality inspectors / machining staff
• When Confirming inspection criteria or a fit
• Ask like this "Where's the Ø25 H7 tolerance?", "Which drawing has the 120±0.1 dimension?"
• You get The location where the dimension number matches exactly — drawing, page, zone (e.g., zone C4). Fits distinguish H7 (hole) from h7 (shaft). Clicking the card highlights that dimension in the drawing page preview in the right panel.
• Note Numbers are never invented. If the indexed drawing doesn't contain that dimension, no exact-match citation is attached. For range questions like "What are the upper/lower limits for Ø25 H7?," if the drawing only has the symbol, a value computed via the ISO formula is given as an "estimated from formula" value with the caveat "Confirm pass/fail with your held standards documents" — use standards documents for inspection pass/fail decisions. → Asking with Drawings

Design/Materials — Tracing drawings and parts lists by part number

• Who Design / manufacturing engineering / materials staff
• When You need to know, from a single part number, which drawing and revision it's drawn on, and what it assembles with
• Ask like this "Show me the drawing for part number VNE-S1," "In this assembly's parts list, what's balloon #7 and how many are needed?"
• You get The title block with an exact part-number match, and the part number, name, quantity, and material from the parts list. The Digital Thread mirror also holds drawing, revision, part number, and BOM references, so the Digital Thread can trace from a part number to its drawing/revision (used in engineering-change impact calculations).
• Note Drawing originals live only in the document store; the Digital Thread keeps only numbers and references.

How to ask, by industry

Industry	Example	What you get
Shipbuilding	"What's the thickness of this stiffener in the block drawing?"	The relevant dimension plus drawing/zone
Heavy industry	"Tolerance on the GT-2871-104 housing bore?"	"Ø62 H7 — revision C, zone B3"
Plant	"Which drawing has the anchor bolt spec for the pump base?"	The spec found in the parts list, with its location
Defense	"What's the material of this part?"	Material from the title block

These examples assume the drawing actually states that information. There are no industry-specific features as such — all are answered with the same exact-match and location-highlighting capability described above. Title blocks, parts lists, and dimensions are searched, but text that only appears in NOTES — fastening torque, heat treatment, coating conditions — is not yet covered by search.

Planned — not yet functional

The following are development plans. They are not in the current release; once released, they will be moved into this document as features. Order is subject to change.

Order	Planned feature	Use case
1	Weld joint tracing	From a weld joint to its Welding Procedure Specification (WPS), welder qualifications, and NDT (UT/RT/MT/PT) results
2	Inspection characteristics → first-article inspection	Linking inspection characteristics (balloons) on a drawing to a first-article inspection sheet, cross-checked against QM measurements
3	Piping ISO spool tracing	Spool-level tracing on piping isometric drawings
4	P&ID ↔ sensor tag	Linking instrument tags on piping and instrumentation diagrams to platform equipment/sensors

Reading scanned drawings (image PDFs) and comparing revisions of scanned drawings are also later-stage items. The drawing latest-revision check ("Drawing" in work readiness), revision comparison, and the drawing card/revision badge in Ask were moved into the features above as of 2026.10. Drawing security classification, view permissions, view logging, and watermarking, used for defense-industry security, shipped in 2026.10 re-release 6 → Access Control — Role Bundles, Data Scope, Document Classification