Plant asset management functions driven by property models

During the plant´s life cycle, plenty of information is generated manually and automatically, not only in the stage of plant operation. Such information concerns all entities which can be described by property models, for example field devices, functional roles from the P&I-Diagram or even software units for process control. This article presents an approach to model these distributed properties in an integrated way. Property information is modeled by statements, which contain important semantics to support diagnosis and asset management related functions. In addition, the model may be used to automatically gain property values of a plant element which does not offer this information a priori. Typically, we address non-intelligent plant elements like pumps or other devices, that do not offer their own measurements. The presented algorithm is designed in a modular way which minimizes the engineering effort and scales with the plant complexity. The approach is already implemented within an industrial environment, realizing a fully automated monitoring application for pumps in a German BP refinery.