High-level description of plant and automation

Design methods and design tools have a crucial role in quaranteeing the quality of automation systems and man-machine interfaces. The abstract and often informal data that is generated during the early phases of the system design should be documented so that it can be easily used in later phases of the design work and also during plant operation. The System Modeling Language (SML) is one way to achieve this goal. The SML with its database system gives users the possibility to manipulate the complex data structures which are needed during the requirement analysis and functional specification phases of the design The framework created by the formalism helps users to describe the plant on different abstraction levels and also from different views. Also the goals and requirements of the plant can be managed more easily when they are stored into these descriptions.