Major Progress Towards Standardized Data Exchange between Computer Aided Design and Process Control Systems

At the NAMUR General Assembly  (November 6^th and 7^th, 2014) Thomas Tauchnitz of Sanofi reported about spectacular progress in adoption and implementation of a standard data exchange between Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tools and Process Control Systems (PCS).  Mr Tauchnitz published a vision for "Integrated Engineering" that includes the possibility to configure and program a PCS in a generic manner in a CAE application, and export the configuration to a PCS where it is compiled.  In collaboration with Mr Tauchnitz, Siemens implemented this between COMOS and PCS 7.  The interface was made bidirectional, because Mr Tauchnitz' objective is to keep the asset information up to date in the CAE tool, that literally becomes an Asset Information Management (AIM) plus a CAE tool, where both engineering and maintenance activities work off the same, up to date asset information.

Simultaneously with the proof of concept, NAMUR worked on a specification for a standard data exchange format for DCS tags that was published a few weeks ago as NAMUR recommendation NE 150.  The standard preserves the intellectual property of all parties by providing a temporary data structure that contains the information related to a PCS object that a user of either system wants to transfer to the other system.  A 'container' serves only one transfer (it is not a databank), and has no checks for completeness, in order to be used in both early and advanced project stages.

Mr. Tauchnitz initiated a working group in the German GMA, including 5 NAMUR companies, 5 CAE suppliers, 6 Automation suppliers and three universities.  Much faster than expected, he reported that four CAE (Aucotec, Bentley, ESP, Siemens) and three PCS providers (ABB, Siemens, Yokogawa) implemented demonstrators of the standard.  In one year, the group built a working set of demonstrators, in which applications transfer information on a specific DCS tag to each other, using the NE 150 standard implemented in AutomationML.

In our ARC Europe blog, we provide more detail on the background of Integrated Engineering, and we elaborate on what we believe to be important potential benefits of using this standard, both for vendors and users.​

​Keywords: NAMUR NE 150, GMA, CAE, AIM, PCS, data container, demonstrators, AutomationML, Tauchnitz, ABB, Aucotec, Bentley, ESP, Siemens, Yokogawa, Integrated Engineering, standard, multilateral cooperation