Scientific news ticker july 2014
AutomationML Becomes International Standard
July 2014 The year 2014 promises to be a very successful year for AutomationML. New projects have been started with new teams built around the new liaisons AutomationML has established with other associations. In July 2014 the association has mastered an important challenge: Part 1 of the standard family IEC 62714, describing the general architecture as well as the requirements, has been reached the status of an International Standard [4]. Additionally, the 3rd AutomationML user conference will be held on October 7th and 8th 2014 with a number of interesting contributions.
Continuously growing complexity of industrial manufacturing systems is demanding steady improvement and more efficient organization of engineering processes for these systems. One powerful approach to meet these challenges is to provide consistent and lossless transfer of engineer data between different engineering tools. The data exchange format AutomationML is one solution to the related problems. The format will be supported and disseminated by AutomationML e.V. This association has been founded in 2009 with the objective to enable seamless data exchanges between different tools in different phases of the engineering process of production systems.
The IAF team has been hosting the office of the association from the very beginning and has been promoting all activities as well as the necessary research since.
The AutomationML format enables comprehensive mapping of plant engineering data, starting with the equipment topology over geometry and kinematic information down to processes and logic dependencies. However, no fundamentally new data format had been developed, in contrast the work has be based upon the existing formats CAEX, COLLADA und PLCopen XML which has been adequately combined.
To promote AutomationML development, continuously new cooperations have been established in order to enable the extension and adaptation of data formats used by AutomationML but maintained by other organizations. In 2013, Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) had been signed e.g. with eCl@ss e.V. and OPC Foundation on the SPS/IPC/Drives fair.
Joint work with eCl@ss e.V will promote guidelines describing how product classifications could be expressed by AutomationML mechanisms, ideally without any changes on the involved standards. Special focus will be on the unification of object semantics within AutomationML data sets exploiting eCl@ss classifications. First publications on the approach had been presented on the Automation Congress in Baden-Baden in spring 2014 [2].
In co-operation with OPC foundation, AutomationML aims at an XML-based method to describe engineering data expressing OPC system structures and behavior. Moreover, it will be defined, how information, stored in AutomationML format, could be transferred using OPC technology. The project results will be published as guidelines as well soon.
Dissemination is another important task of AutomationML e.V.. The 3rd AutomationML User conference: “AutomationML as integration format - networking of organizations, tools, engineering disciplines” will be held in Blomberg on October 7th/8th 2014, organized by the IAF team, at the partner company Phoenix Contact. In addition to industrial experiences with AutomationML applications latest research efforts, results reached within co-operations and new developments related to AutomationML will be discussed.
We are looking forward to intensive discussions with you.
Contact: apl. Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Arndt Lüder
[1] R. Drath (Editor): Datenaustausch in der Anlagenplanung mit AutomationML, Springer Verlag, 2010.
[2] VDI Wissensforum GmbH: Kongressprogramm, http://www.vdi-wissensforum.de/fileadmin/redaktion/dokumente/programme/tagung/02TA202014.pdf, Zugriff: 04.07.2014.
[3] AutomationML e.V.: Conference 2014: https://www.automationml.org/o.red.c/conference2014.html, Zugriff: 04.07.2014.
[4] http://eshop.normservis.de/detail_de/iec/62714-1-ed-1-0/26.6.2014