Efficient incident handling in industrial automation through collaborative engineering

Abstract

We present our monitoring and decision framework for collaborative engineering for globally distributed operation, support, maintenance, and services for industrial automation. The framework provides relevant information to plant operators, engineers, staff and stakeholders to support the handling of incidents, based on semantically-appropriate factors such as personnel skills, physical location of affected equipment and dependencies between plant elements. We discuss the proposed application and present the architecture and implementation. Based on incoming events the framework selects, aggregates and displays information automatically for human processing possibly at distant control centres. For example an alarm in a manufacturing facility can trigger the display of relevant information on multiple devices such as workstations, tablets, or large control-room screens to supervisors and experts. Devices can be potentially in different locations and can comprise different visualization capabilities. The core of our framework uses semantic models and formal methods-based techniques to aggregate and process this information.