Industrial Plant Topology Models to Facilitate Automation Engineering

Industrial plant topology models can potentially automate many automation engineering tasks that are today carried out manually. Information on plant topologies is today mostly available in informal CAD drawings, but not formal models that transformations could easily process. The upcoming DEXPI/ISO15926 standard may enable turning CAD drawings into such models, but was so far mainly used for data exchange. This paper proposes extensions to the CAYENNE method for control logic and process graphics generation to utilize DEXPI models and demonstrates the supported model transformation chain prototypically in two case studies involving industrial plants. The results indicate that the model expressiveness and mappings were adequate for the addressed use cases and the model processing could be executed in the range of minutes.