As technology improves, not all documentation systems can adapt to these changes. Some people also have a problem adapting to these changes and want to do things within comfort zones or old methods leading to frustration and poor deliverable documents.
With fieldbus technology, instrumentation loop drawings become very simple drawings on the one hand, but at the same time another type of drawing, that was normally not part of the deliverable documents within a project, a bus or network layout type drawing is required. The question arises of what documents are worth the effort to produce in today's fast moving, high production world.
To complicate the matter further, is that the fieldbus systems cannot always cater for all plant requirements like safety standards, speed of some monitoring instruments measurements, etc. Thus resulting in a combination of fieldbus and conventional technology where often these combinations of technology need to be represented on one single drawing or document.
Because the developers of the 1Des - One design tool for instrumentation and electrical design documentation system - understand all this, they have developed the 1Des system to produce any level of the above described documents ie, it can produce simple fieldbus drawings (Foundation Fieldbus, ASI bus, PROFIBUS, etc) (See Figure 1), more complex conventional loop drawings as well as a combination of these drawings on one document.
1Des can also provide a network layout diagram which can display the different types of network as well as the instruments connected to the bus networks (See Figure 2).
Control programming assistance
Because 1Des already has all the information within its database to generate the above-mentioned drawings, it also provides tools to the 1Des user to generate PLC programming code from standard code templates. The PLC system can for example generate a typical code sample for a motor drive block or analogue input block or digital output block of code. 1Des will then use these sample blocks of code and produce the code for example for all the motor drives found within the database or all the AI instruments found within the database.
This saves time for the engineer or programmer as all the donkey work is then completed and the person can focus on the interlinking and real programming sections of the PLC program. (The same type of integration to scada system is also available - see 'Engineering design software: productivity for EPC and Ops' September 2007, Instrumentation and Control).
For more information contact Johan Hamman, DesSoft, +27 (0)12 654 7516, [email protected], www.dessoft.co.za
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