What’s behind this MTP?

Ever shorter product life cycles in the process industry make innovations in the engineering and operation of plants necessary. Modular process engineering structures have already been successfully tested in practice and have significantly reduced engineering efforts. However, fully integrated modular engineering long failed because controllers from different manufacturers could not be combined across vendors within a single plant. As a result, the advantages of the modular structure were offset by new integration efforts for the individual modules — the so-called Process Equipment Assemblies (PEAs) according to VDI/VDE Guideline 2776.

To solve this problem, a vendor-independent description of PEA automation was developed and originally initiated as VDI/VDE/NAMUR Guideline 2658 in a joint effort by the user organization NAMUR and the industry association ZVEI. This standardized description is provided through a Module Type Package (MTP). In order to establish the standard globally and secure its technological development in the long term, the MTP concept has since been officially adopted and continued by the Profibus and Profinet International (PI) organization.

As an internationally supported standard, the MTP now makes it possible to seamlessly integrate multiple PEAs with controllers from a wide range of manufacturers into any Process Orchestration Layer (POL). The POL serves as the higher-level control and management system of the modular plant, with functionalities comparable to those of a traditional process control system.