Extraction of Automation System Engineering Knowledge for Mapping Plant and Simulation Interfaces

Abstract

Design and integration of industrial automation systems require cooperation of different engineering disciplines and various engineering tools during both design-time and runtime. The scope of this chapter is to bridge the gap between the design-time description and the runtime integration in a semiautomated way. Furthermore, this chapter focuses on the problem of the integration of legacy systems with limited access to original engineering data. It is assumed that an interface between a real industrial system and software automation tools is OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and we propose to derive the plant knowledge from the OPC UA tag list. Since it is not possible to solve this task in general, we require the tag list to adopt the naming convention defined by the international standard IEC 81346, which is widespread in large-scale systems. This tag list is parsed and the engineering knowledge is derived and stored in the Engineering Knowledge Base. Consequently, the plant knowledge is mapped to knowledge related to software automation tools, such as simulations. The proposed methodology is evaluated on a real-life example dealing with a laboratory tank model.