Entity Data Model

Introduction

Objectives

In an industrial environment we quite often need to

describe an industrial plant consisting of a bunch of different parts, each having a certain purpose and set of properties, and which are related in various ways
manage process or maintenance data of the plant and its features
do a high-performance cost-benefit analysis and create key performance indicators

Therefore we need to

15 px „Dissemble“ the system into theoretical blocks representing the real as well as intangible parts of the system.
15 px Identify the necessary properties of the blocks.
15 px Think about how blocks are possibly related to each other.
15 px Think about the functions and features of blocks.

Plant picture

Lets start with a simple picture and have a look what blocks we find in a possible plant:

A closer look at the "PUMP" block reveals its properties and property values

Of course, a plant consists of multiple pumps, each described with the same set of properties (TAG, vendor, power, maintenance data). The real pumps in the plant are distinguished by different property values as given in the table.

Pump	TAG	Vendor	Power	Maintenance
#1	P0815	Andritz	2 kW	Yearly
#2	P0816	Andritz	5 kW	Monthly
#3	P0817	Sulzer	4 kW	Yearly

We can redefine or extend our objectives by

15 px Design a descriptive model including all required blocks and properties of the system
15 px An object in this model specifies possible properties for a certain part of the real system

Transition

From the plant picture into UBIK

In summary we can picture the transition from the plant picture into an object- / data-model like

and post our first definition

UBIK metamodel: A descriptive model, where objects provide information about the aspects of the data, is also called “Metamodel”.