Some Technical Background
One of the main requirements was (and still is) that the scope of the data model covers the entire lifecycle of a facility (e.g. oil refinery) and its components (e.g. pipes, pumps and their parts, etc.). Since such a facility over such a long time entails many different types of activities on a myriad of different objects it became clear that a generic and data-driven data model would be required.
A simple example will illustrate this. There are thousands of different types of physical objects in a facility (pumps, compressors, pipes, instruments, fluids, etc). Each of these has many properties. If all combinations would be modelled in a "hard-coded" fashion, the number of combinations would be staggering, and unmanageable.
The solution is a "template" that represents the semantics of: "This object has a property of X yyyy" (where yyyy is the unit of measure). Any instance of that template refers to the applicable reference data:
- physical object (e.g. my Induction Motor)
- indirect property type (e.g. the class "cold locked rotor time")
- base property type (here: time)
- scale (here: seconds)
Without being able to make reference to those classes, via the Internet, it will be impossible to express this information.
Read more about this topic: ISO 15926
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