A Persistent Naming Scheme for Embedded Systems in Automation

Complex technical systems are generally multi-vendor solutions that comprise a large number of reusable vendor-specific components (devices). They continuously grow in size and complexity, and are progressively confronted with increased maintenance demands. Therefore, the engineering of these systems is usually regulated by international standards. Concretely, for electric substation automation, the IEC61850 standard defines how to specify and to configure devices to perform specific substation functions. However, there are still high maintenance costs when configuring these systems. Examples for reconfiguration are software upgrades, device exchanges, etc. One of the major reasons for this are device data models and their naming conventions (schemes), which introduce additional coupling between devices on logical layer (e.g. device A requires a named object of device B). It is, therefore, essential to isolate device data models from each other.In this paper we propose a naming scheme that uses persistent object names (i.e. identifiers that do not change) to interrelate device data models. By isolating data models it is possible to significantly reduce the coupling between devices and to improve their interoperability.