The maintenance station is specialized for plant asset management (also known as plant-floor asset management), i.e. the management of company assets that are used as fixed assets for production. Its tasks include efficient administration and management of equipment in technological systems, in particular the I&C equipment, with the objective of maintaining and increasing the value.

The following maintenance strategies are used for this purpose:

• Corrective maintenance
  Response to pending error and diagnostics messages
  • Failures are risked or minimized by redundant configurations
  • Maintenance in the form of repair or replacement
• Preventive maintenance
  Preventive diagnostics and maintenance
  • Initiation of appropriate maintenance measures before a fault actually occurs
  • Maintenance in the form of time-dependent or status-dependent maintenance (depending on degree of wear)
• Predictive maintenance
  Predictive diagnostics for timely detection of potential problems and determination of the remaining service life

Using the maintenance station, the maintenance engineer can check the hardware of the automation system, evaluate its diagnostics messages and information and derive maintenance measures from them. He or she is thus in a position to plan, control and document the entire maintenance cycle - starting with the arrival of a diagnostics message, continuing with the evaluation of detailed diagnostics information and the planning, initiation and tracking of maintenance measures, all the way to their completion.

SIMATIC PCS 7 Maintenance Station

The SIMATIC PCS 7 Maintenance Station makes additional hardware or software components for plant asset management superfluous. Fully integrated in SIMATIC PCS 7, it supplements the process control system with a valuable instrument for minimizing the total cost of ownership over the complete life cycle of the plant.

Parallel to process control, the SIMATIC PCS 7 Maintenance Station provides consistent maintenance information and functions for the system components of the plant (assets):

• The plant operator receives all process-relevant information via the operator system, as well as an overview of the diagnostics status of the process control system.
• The maintenance engineer checks the hardware of the automation system using the SIMATIC PCS 7 Maintenance Station, and processes its diagnostics messages and maintenance requests.

The SIMATIC PCS 7 Maintenance Station provides maintenance and service personnel access to:

• Components of the process control system, e.g. intelligent field devices and I/O modules, fieldbuses, controllers, network components and plant buses as well as single stations, servers and clients
• Assets that do not directly belong to the process control system, such as pumps, motors, centrifuges, heat exchangers (mechanical assets) or control loops. They are represented by proxy objects in which the diagnostics rules are stored.

It is therefore no longer the case that maintenance functions and information are only available in a separate level independent of the production process.

Plant operators and service personnel are thus able to constantly act the following, for example:

• Service requests
• Service approvals
• Placing an asset in "In Service" status
• Information regarding a completed service measure