Applying and adapting the IEC 61346 standard to industrial automation applications

The IEC 61346 standard describes a reference designation system for identifying the objects and structuring the information of virtually any kind of technical system. The generality of the standard leads in some cases to a slightly loose definition of its concepts, which can hamper its applicability to a concrete domain. Our aim is to make the IEC 61346 standard suitable for the construction of reference designations of industrial plants. Therefore, we impose some constraints to the standard and define the process to follow in order to apply it to industrial automation applications. The removal of ambiguities should also facilitate the interoperability of computer implementations of the standard coming from different vendors. Finally, we show as well how to combine IEC 61346 to existing standards on enterprise-control system integration.