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In this paper the term engineering is used with regards to automation systems in industrial plants. According to [10], engineering is defined as
“...all tasks and activities, that are carried out for the purpose of planning, installation, commissioning, operation and maintenance of technical plants.“
This definition emphasizes that engineering not only concerns the functional aspects of automation software, but spans over the whole life cycle of a plant. Fig. 1 depicts example engineering activities during the plant life cycle. Several engineering areas participate in the engineering process of the automation planning project, like process planning, plant structure planning, electrical planning, or control software design. They regard different aspects of the automation system. In each engineering area particular aspects of the entities (devices) are parameterized and the entity is integrated in the automation system in different ways. For instance in the process planning mechanical assembly of devices and material flows are determined while in the electrical planning the electrical connections of devices are established. The most important characteristic of the classical engineering process is the strong orientation to the different participating engineering areas. Their separated activities - each representing a specific view on the plant - are done by engineering experts who use their expert’s tools (CAD/CAE-systems), create a view-specific partial model of the plant and generate specific data output. The sum of all view-specific data represents the plant documentation. Although the tools and data are separated it is obvious that the various engineering activities are not independent of each other, but have a lot of interrelations as all views regard the same real plant.
 The isolated data storage and individual proprietary semantics of the view-specific tools cause a missing transferability (overall usability) of the created engineering data between the different tools. During the plant planning phase often changes have to be made in the automation planning project. Configurations of a particular entity, of a large number of entities or even a whole model may change frequently. As the viewspecific activities have a lot of interrelations and dependencies, manual multiple data entry is necessary. For example, if changes in a process planning model occur, the control software has also to be adapted. The manual multiple entry and adaptation of data causes the strong problem of inconsistent data (usually manual naming conventions are used to reduce this problem). Also an extensive support of engineering processes (like problem solving processes and workflow between engineering areas) is not possible. Another effect of the separated planning tools and data is the missing availability of planning data for engineering activities during the operation of the plant like diagnosis, maintenance, asset management, integration of enterprise systems (like ERP or MIS), asset optimization amongst others. Today the separation of views and tools of the different engineering areas do not match the requirements for effective engineering. Instead an integrated consideration of all engineering activities as well as the activities during plant operating phase is necessary (see also [11]). Modern engineering approaches try to address the problems of data and process integration as explained in the following Section. The goal of modern engineering approaches is to increase the productivity of the engineering activities by supporting of the engineering process in three points: - Automation of task sequences during the engineering process
- Integration and transferability of engineering data
- Reuse of engineering solutions (automation planning projects or parts of them)
New approaches for the development of automation systems have to consider the fact that the automation system itself hardly can be changed [6]. Alternative solutions have to support existing system architectures and legacy systems to a large extend. To solve this problem, automation software companies developed modern approaches for the engineering of automation systems based on component-based ideas. Starting point of modern engineering approaches are the different engineering views on a plant. For the integration of the engineering data, similarities between the different views can be identified: the link between all individual views on the plant is the real existing device within the plant with its various aspects for the automation of the plant. All participating engineers view their respective aspects of the device. Some aspects concern the device itself like mechanical / electrical characteristics, electrical / process connections and control software. Other aspects concern the actual position and tasks of the device within the automation system like device configuration, wiring diagrams and operating graphs. Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
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