Patent ID: 8443355

Claim:
A method of managing a life cycle of a plurality of Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), also referred to as assets, in a process plant for an end-user in which in the life cycles of the IEDs go through: a. an Engineering phase b. an Installation/commissioning phase; and c. an Operational phase, the method comprising the steps of: a. creating a Device Integration Aspect Object by collecting data such as engineering design data documentation during the engineering phase of the IED's development or the plant setup, plant configuration data relating to the set up of the IED or the process plant applicable to the installation/commissioning phase, data from maintenance management software that are integrated with the IED or the process plant applicable to the operational phase and diagnostic data about the health of the device in the process plant applicable to the operational phase; b. utilizing the Device Integration Aspect Object, in a Life Cycle Management System (LCMS) for managing information from different phases in the lifecycle of the IED or the process plant; c. performing homogenization and version control checks to help the end user optimize the life of the IED applicable to both the installation/commissioning and operational phases, the version control checks facilitate the import of only those pre-configured Device Integration Aspect Objects from the libraries which passed the check for version compatibility, and the version control checks perform homogenization to help the end user optimize the life of the IED applicable to both the installation/commissioning and operational phases; d. performing Asset Management, to prolong the life of the asset applicable to the operational phase; e. supporting a plurality of formats and standards across documentation, maintenance data, diagnostic tools, network protocols, control protocols, Operating System platforms and programming environments to manage the life cycle, applicable to all the phases; and f. performing life cycle management in a location-independent fashion, the location-independent fashion providing a connectivity application that allows connecting and managing IEDs via the Internet; and h. providing a highly available Life Cycle Management Server without a connected control system to provide the life cycle management service for distributed systems via the Internet.