Software for process industry in plant engineering & management

Functional expansion of Comos Walkinside for innovative 3D plant visualization

With the new version 10.1 of the Comos software solution, the Siemens Industry Automation Division is expanding its range of industrial software for the process industry in plant engineering and plant management. The Comos Enterprise Platform for efficient and system-wide cooperation was further developed using the new Comos industrial database (Comos iDB). It is designed for sector-specific requirements in a wide variety of industries. New projects can be installed quickly and easily, because fewer customer-specific adaptations are required. The Comos Enterprise Platform ensures fast data processing and secure data management even with an increasing volume of project data.

Integration of the Comos software solution with the Simatic process control system PCS 7 enables the engineer or operator to integrate process plant engineering with central data management. The consistent and bidirectional exchange of information between the two systems has been developed further in order to save time and costs in overall plant engineering. For example, sequence controls, types and instances functionally engineered in Comos can now be transferred to a plant-specific automation function.

An additional innovation for plant management is the further development of Comos Walkinside. In Comos 10.1, the powerful 3D visualization software provides a very realistic representation of plants of any complexity even before commissioning. Comos Walkinside directly accesses the data in Comos. Due to the logical connection of geometrical objects with the engineering data, the 3D image of the plant is constantly kept up-to-date throughout the entire lifecycle of the plant. Head-mounted devices (virtual reality glasses) and gamepads to control the virtual characters give users the impression that they are really moving around in the plant. Comos Walkinside can be used for design reviews, simulation or operational engineering, for example. Furthermore, training can take place under realistic and safe conditions before a plant has been commissioned.

In addition to this, further new developments and functional expansions help to increase the efficiency of data management throughout the entire lifecycle of a plant and facilitate decision-making for users and management.
With respect to piping and instrumentation (P&ID), with Comos 10.1, users can now for the first time link PDF documents, such as piping and instrumentation flow diagrams, to a process picture in Comos P&ID or transfer them in full. The new import function can make the manual mapping of P&IDs easier or even unnecessary. This saves the user time and reduces potential data inconsistencies.

Siemens consistently promotes the integration of its industrial software range for the product and plant lifecycle - with interfaces to both its own products and products from other manufacturers. In this way, for example, components and catalogs can be synchronized even more efficiently with the Teamcenter PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) software from Siemens via the new Process Data Interface of Comos 10.1. In addition, in the new release, plant structures from the Comos 2D engineering can be exchanged and synchronized with the 3D design in NX, the Siemens software for digital product design. The compatibility of Comos with Probad, the IBM calculation software for designing printed parts, has also been expanded further.