Patent attributes
An industrial integrated development environment (IDE) provides a development framework for designing, programming, and configuring multiple aspects of an industrial automation system using a common design environment and data model. Projects creating using embodiments of the IDE system can be built on an object-based model rather than, or in addition to, a tag-based architecture. To this end, the IDE system can support the use of automation objects that serve as building blocks for this object-based development structure. These automation objects represent corresponding physical industrial assets and have associated programmatic attributes relating to those assets, including data logging and device configuration parameters. Functional relationships between automation objects can be defined to yield object hierarchies, and object attributes can be propagated across objects up and down the hierarchy.
