Modelling Industrial Plant Automation Systems Using IEC 61346

The IEC 61346 standard establishes general principles for structuring the information of technical systems. This paper discusses the ideas shown in the Standard emphasizing the fact that some parts of it are ambiguous and can lead to different interpretations of the basic concepts. Consequently, we derive a concrete interpretation of the standard that tries to remove the ambiguities. By removing ambiguities the Standard can be used as the basis for developing an industrial Software platform. Automation applications built on the platform benefit from a consistent data model, which can be used to query the application and exchange data with other applications.