System for the automatic generation of information on device specifications for PLT devices

Standardization of requirements and device specification for automation products is essential for an integrated engineering in the instrumentation of plants. The most important standard today is the NE100 of the NAMUR [1]. This standard precisely defines all characteristics for automation products. We want to establish a product-data-management based on such standardized characteristics. The goal is to automatically generate for any given device configuration the associated device characteristics. Technically such a system is based on the database system of SAP/R3. In order to meet various customer requirements concerning the format and information depths of the characteristics we have chosen an universal way of mapping the device characteristics by a certain filter process. By that the universal information is transferred according to the specified customer requirements. We expect time savings by means of this system in the range of 25-50% of our internal efforts in the engineering process.