The CAEX tool suite - user assistance for the use of standardized plant engineering data exchange

Improving efficiency in Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) engineering and ensuring interoperability requires a tool or a tool suite, which handles the desired (heterogeneous) data representations or better an integrated (homogeneous) data representation - a data format aiming at interoperability. CAEX (Computer Aided Engineering Exchange, [1]) is one possible example of such a format. Its objective is a tool-independent description of plant planning data. CAEX is also used as a top-level format for AutomationML [2], [3]. To simplify the usage of this complex data exchange format, the authors developed various useful assistance tools which help users to work with it. These tools for transformation of arbitrary plant engineering data, their background and methodology will be presented in this contribution.