Define an Equipment Association for a Tag

You define equipment in a Plant SCADA project to create logical groupings that reflect the machinery or processes being monitored. When you specify an equipment association for a tag, you are simply adding the tag to one of the equipment groups you have defined.

This allows you to use a project's equipment hierarchy as a way to reference your tags.

You can associate equipment with the following tag types:

• Advanced alarms

• Analog alarms

• Multi-digital alarms

• Digital alarms

• Time stamped alarms

• Time stamped analog alarms

• Time stamped digital alarms

• Variable tags

• Trend tags

• SPC tags

• Accumulators

To specify an equipment association for a tag:

1. Locate the tag record that you would like to update.

2. In the Equipment field, enter the name of the equipment with which you would like to associate the tag.

   You can select the required equipment name from the drop-down menu. The list includes the current equipment definitions.

3. If required, specify a Cluster for the tag. This is only useful if the associated equipment is defined for every cluster and you want to specify a specific cluster for this particular tag.

4. Click Save to update the tag with your changes.

See Define Equipment in Plant SCADA Studio.

If required, you can use Plant SCADA's Project DBF Add-In tool to define equipment associations for the tags in your project. This could be particularly useful if your project adheres to an tag naming convention that could be adopted as the basis of an equipment hierarchy (see Use the Project DBF Add-In to Define Equipment Associations).

Example

You may have a project with tags that comply with a maintenance naming code. A typical tag name may be "M01AC_02C01ST". Using the naming code as a reference, it is possible to determine that this tag monitors the running status of a compressor on air conditioner 2 on level 1.

This demonstrates how an existing naming convention may be used as the framework for an equipment hierarchy. For example, you could associate the following equipment definition with the tag described above (and any others that apply to the same compressor):

Level01.AirCond02.Comp01

This would allow you to keep your site-based maintenance IDs while also providing a way to work with the data points using a logical, hierarchical structure.