Equipment Classes and Parameters

Equipment classes in Assets are a fundamental concept that significantly enhances the efficiency of building and managing asset hierarchies. They act as reusable templates for similar types of equipment or assets, which can be easily instantiated to reduce repetitive configuration efforts. This structure is vital for industries where multiple instances of similar machinery or components exist, such as pumps, conveyors, or production lines​​.

Key Benefits of Equipment Classes

• Time Efficiency: Rather than individually configuring each asset, you create an equipment class that defines a standard template. For instance, if a plant has multiple pumps, you can define an equipment class for the pumps, and use that class to instantiate each pump as an asset. This drastically reduces the set-up time and ensures consistency across similar assets​​.
• Consistency: By creating a class with standard parameters, properties, and commands, you ensure that all instantiated assets are uniformly configured. This is crucial for large-scale systems, as it eliminates human error and guarantees uniform behavior across all assets of the same type​.
• Scalability: As organizations expand their operations, the need for new assets grows. Equipment classes allow for effortless scaling since new instances can be created quickly using the pre-defined templates​.

The Role of Parameters

Parameters play a critical role in equipment classes. They act as placeholders within the configuration, allowing for variations in the instantiated assets while maintaining the same underlying template. When an equipment class is instantiated, the parameter values are provided to differentiate between the instances​​.

For example, a pump class could have a parameter for PumpID or Location. When creating multiple pump assets, the same class is used, but each instance has a unique PumpID or Location value based on the parameter inputs. This flexibility ensures that each asset instance remains unique without needing a separate class for every variation​.

The Role of Relative References

Relative references enable the flexibility to reuse data tags, paths, and values across different instances of an equipment class or even outside of it. By using relative references, a class can define general behaviors (such as pulling data from sensors) while dynamically adjusting specifics based on the asset instance’s context​​.

For example, instead of hard coding the data source for a particular asset, the tag paths in the class can include relative references such as <<@@self/TankNum>> or <<@@parent/Location>>. This dynamic capability ensures that when the equipment class is instantiated, it automatically adjusts to its environment without requiring manual configuration​.

Bulk Asset Configurator

The Bulk Asset Configurator is a powerful tool that further simplifies the process of instantiating and updating assets. It allows you to use Microsoft Excel to create or modify multiple assets simultaneously. The configurator works by mapping the equipment class to a spreadsheet format where multiple asset instances can be defined and instantiated in one operation​.

This tool is especially valuable when dealing with hundreds or thousands of assets. You simply provide the necessary parameters (aliases) for each instance in the Microsoft Excel sheet, and the configurator processes them all in bulk, significantly reducing the engineering effort and manual labor​.