A rule format for industrial plant information reasoning

Today, the engineering of complex automated systems is usually carried out with the help of CAE (computer-aided engineering) software tools with an integrated data basis to store and retrieve planning data throughout the planning and implementation process. This data forms the basis for the automation of engineering tasks, i.e. repetitive parts of the engineering work can be carried out automatically if the task can be described in a computer-interpretable format. Because human reasoning and human behaviour can be described most naturally by "if-then-rules", such rules can also be employed to capture engineering knowledge. Up to now, no standard rule format for industrial plant engineering information reasoning has evolved. The authors have evaluated various existing rule ontologies regarding their suitability for this task, focusing especially on RuleML and MathML. The authors have combined, adapted and extended these markup languages to create the basis for a new rule format. The result presented here has been successfully applied to implement rule-based engineering of automation systems, especially the automatic instantiation of asset management functionalities and the automatic creation of interlocking control code, and has proven its feasibility.