Volume 59, Issue 1 -

Within the field of industrial production, discrete production and process technology have been established as mostly separated domains. Today´s development systematics and production requirements very often ask for an integration of the separated considerations in particular models. As a necessary presumption to enable a better, interdisciplinary integration up to an integrated automation control for hybrid plants, this paper compares and analyses the physical background, the technical task breakdown as well as established models and systems of both domains.

The digital factory is a concept that has been motivation for several initiatives, e. g. for digital engineering, the standard IEC 62264 that provides an approach to the integration of Enterprise Resource Planning as well as Manufacturing Execution Systems or to eBusiness applications. This involves a big number of existing approaches, information models and different views on this topic. Thus, the discussion about the characteristics and further the number of relevant models as well as its fundamentals to get a common view of the digital factory is still open.

The retrieval of information from heterogeneous data sources in industrial automation systems has to take the contextual meaning of the data into consideration. This paper shows how software agents automate the information retrieval process and support users in gathering information in industrial automation systems using semantic knowledge.

In this Paper a modelling approach is presented that merges the operation characteristics and the energy aspects of automation modules into one model. A characteristic of this approach is the state-based behavior model. An example is used to demonstrate how the information in the model can be used for an energy-optimized operation controlled by software agents.

The complexity of technical systems in general and automation systems in particular rises constantly, and so does the complexity of the respective planning processes. Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) have shown to counteract this trend. The authors describe in this paper the study results of KBS used in practice. Apart of the basics and potentials of these systems, the paper focusses on today´s applications and their deficits. Last but not least, the future challenges of Knowledge-Based Systems with regard to the deficits are proposed.

This paper presents a tool supporting the systematic logic controller design by teams of automation as well as process engineers. Starting point of the design is an informal specification which describes the desired plant behaviour. This paper starts with a summary of the systematic logic controller design approach and emphasizes the requirements for appropriate tool support. Afterwards the methodology is applied to an example process and a tool for the design of logic controllers according to this approach is presented.

Smooth cooperation in interdisciplinary projects requires systematic, consistent, standardized and unambiguous terminologies — especially in all fields concerned with standardization, the interdisciplinary field of activity of the German Institute for Standardization (DIN). To this end, the terminology management system iglos (acronym for “intelligent glossary”) provides a working environment that radically exceeds the possibilities provided by existing terminology management systems. Based on a new model of a linguistic sign, different understandings of terminological data in different disciplines are precisely distinguished. Optimal coordination of terminology work and regular work processes is established by integrating the iglos web application including the iglos terminology engineering process ( iglos tep ) into all relevant processes.