Fieldbus material take-off estimation: Towards an automated cost estimation of fieldbus installations

The decision for conventional parallel wiring or digital fieldbus technology is often arrived at rather early stages of the design process and therefore very often rather seems to be a matter of taste than to be derived via an objective goal function. To overcome this situation, we developed a prototypical engineering decision support system that combines an abstract definition of the communications needs with coarse equipment layout information to derive all the necessary figures to support an informed economic decision for a particular technology by automatically generating a fieldbus material take-off. This paper presents and discusses the architecture and features of the work-in-progress prototype which has been integrated in the commercial CAE-system COMOS.