GF_TE_IFIP98_sept_1998

Frey, G.; Egger T.:
Closing the gap between engineering and business software
Proceedings of the The Tenth International IFIP WG 5.2/5.3 Conference Prolamat'98, Trento, 09.-11.09.1998, CD-ROM paper #27.

The production of a wide range of chemical products using the same flexible plants is at best handled by process control systems (PCS) that support recipe based control. In addition to the use of PCS, plant management systems (PMS) have found wide acceptance in the industry. Yet there is a gap between the "technological world" of PCS and the "commercial world" of PMS. In order to achieve consistent data handling and information flow throughout all levels of automation, this gap has to be closed. In this contribution a solution to this problem is proposed, connecting the different worlds using a relational database. The presented work was done by the Institute of Process Automation of the University of Kaiserslautern in a cooperation with Hartmann & Braun AG, and led to the development of the software system SymBatch Production Manager.