Systematic Automation and Maintenance of Plants

No additional hardware or software tools are required. Plant operators and maintenance engineers use the same Simatic PCS 7 tools and operator interfaces with information that has been filtered and prepared for the relevant application area.

With the new Simatic PCS 7 Asset Management, the plant operator receives all the process-relevant information via the HMI functions of the PCS 7 Operator Station (OS) and intervenes selectively in the process. The maintenance engineer, by contrast, monitors the hardware structure of the automation system using the Maintenance Station (MS) in order to be able to process diagnostics and maintenance requests.

For example, the maintenance engineer can call up the entire plant overview with status displays and system-wide alarm management in order to assess the status of the plant at a glance. Individual events in the hierarchy tree of the hardware structure are also displayed – the diagnostics data appear in faceplate form, and any maintenance requests are visible at a click of the mouse.

The data structure of the Simatic PCS 7 Asset Management complies with the requirements of Namur (interest group for process control engineering in the chemical and pharmaceuticals industry): Information from the process is separate from the status messages of the hardware structure. This includes all the automation components of a plant, starting with the field devices, through the I/O cards, fieldbus, controllers and network components, right up to the plant bus and the OS servers and clients.

During operation, the individual automation components, such as modern field devices, supply maintenance-related and diagnostics-relevant information as well as information on the process. In addition to the diagnostics information of the process control system, this results in a conclusive picture of the maintenance status of a plant and the measures to be taken.