Communication Architecture for Automatic Plant Documentation Updates

Today's exible demands and short product life cycles have lead to a modular thinking for machinery and plant engineering. A hidden challenge for this sector is the maintenance of plant documentation throughout the entire operating time of the machine components. This paper introduces an architecture for updating plant documentation. The concept is based on a exible masterslave hierarchy for IT-integrated machine components and aims at detecting physical changes in them. The standard data exchange format AutomationML functions as a decentralized and up-to-date virtual representation of each component carrying all types and contents of both construction and documentation disciplines.