Engineering of distributed control systems

Resumo

Besides the functional view on distributed control systems, the engineering aspect becomes more and more important. Hard economical conditions in the Automation and Process Control Industry are making secondary processes as Product Data Management and System Engineering more relevant. It will be essential to integrate the whole engineering process. Here the transport of information without losses from one engineering (live cycle) phase to an other must be provided. It is proposed here to regard the distributed control system as a product as defined in ISO 10303 (STEP) and to use the already built infrastructure of STEP. The problem of describing the distributed control system is put down to describing product data (solved in STEP). This approach is validated by the reference implementation (MOVA).