Equipment

In Plant SCADA, the term "equipment" is used to describe an object-oriented architecture within a project that can be used to reference the machinery or processes being monitored. Equipment definitions create logical groupings that allow you to organize your project using a hierarchical design. Each definition brings together the base SCADA properties into a single entity that can be easily replicated within your project.

For example, if a pump is represented in your project as a piece of equipment, it will bring together the tags, events, alarms, permissions, communications, scheduling and scripting associated with the pump. You can associate the pump with a particular geographical area, or include it as part a functional process.

Note: To be able to define equipment, you need to have a report server process defined (see Add a Report Server Process).

This section of the help explains the concepts that define the way equipment is configured in a Plant SCADA project. These include:

• Equipment Hierarchy — the object model that is created by the equipment definitions in a project

• Equipment Types — the templates you can use to add multiple instances of a particular piece of equipment to your project

• Equipment Instances — the representation of a physical piece of equipment in your project that can be based on a particular equipment type

• Equipment States — operational states for a piece of equipment that you can use for scheduling

• Equipment References - the link added between a piece of equipment, and/or items belonging to other equipment within your project. The equipment reference can also be to equipment, and/or items that is outside the equipment hierarchy.

This section also explains the different approaches you can take when defining equipment within a project.

• If you are creating a new project (or adding a new section to an existing project), use the Equipment Editor to build an equipment hierarchy and automatically generate tags from that hierarchy (see Equipment Editor).

  For specific, task-based information that describes how to configure equipment in a Plant SCADA project using the Equipment Editor, see:

  • Configure Equipment Types Using Equipment Editor

  • Configure Equipment Instances Using Equipment Editor.

• If you would like to add an equipment hierarchy to an existing project, you can associate your existing variable tags, trends and alarms with equipment in Plant SCADA Studio (see Define an Equipment Association for a Tag).

  For specific, task-based information that describes how to configure equipment in Plant SCADA Studio, see Configure Equipment in Plant SCADA Studio.