The AutomationML standard series IEC 62714 „Engineering data exchange format for use in industrial automation systems engineering” already contains many use cases and guidelines of how system engineering information is modelled as well as which meta information could enhance the data excahnge.
In order to specify these definitons with examples, to apply them to specific use cases, and to facilitate the first steps with AutomationML, specific issues for the modelling of data in AutomationML are illustrated in Best Practise Recommendations (BPR). In addition, the BPR shall provide a consistent realization for specific use cases and shall, thus, complement the AutomationML standard documents.
BPRs are no subject of standardization but in case of a concretization of the IEC 62714 series the content could be included in it later on – within a maintenance cycle.
AutomationML is realized as a distributed document format, i.e. a project can be stored in different files of different formats. The files can be available locally or even centrally. Thus, they can be stored, for example, in a project share or in the internet. For that, it is important to know the root file that contains the project entry point. Additionally, it is also important to know which file is a part of the project in the data transfer.
To cope with these challenges, a complete AutomationML project can be stored by using an AutomationML Container. In doing so, all relevant files resp. all files, that are not centrally available, can be stored in an ECMA OPC archive as one package.