Engineering of distributed control systems

Besides the functional view on distributed control systems, the engineering aspect becomes more and more important. It will be essential to integrate the whole engineering process. Here the transport of information without losses from one engineering (live cycle) phase to an other must be provided. It is proposed here, to regard the distributed control system as a product as defined in ISO 10303 (STEP). Then all the methods and the already built infrastructure of STEP are available. The problem of describing the distributed control system is put down to the problem of describing product data (solved in STEP). This approach is validated by reference implementations as "Advanced Control Network" (ACORN) and "Modular, open and distributed Function Block systems for automation" (MOVA).