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Component organization / construction hierarchy

Each discipline has its own descriptive methods for describing a machine. Over time, these methods have come to focus on their specialized tasks, and are therefore not suitable in themselves for structuring and describing a machine in an interdisciplinary manner. In general, an electrical CAD diagram of a machine is structured differently than the software on the machine.

In order to be able nonetheless to describe a machine exhaustively and meaningfully, a functional description is needed. This means that important parts and functions of a machine are no longer hierarchically represented based on component structure, assembly, or wiring, but rather are arranged based on their functions.

An interdisciplinary description of the structure of machines and installations is achieved through functional decomposition, which results in a functional construction hierarchy.

In the process, all of a machine’s components are arranged into a compositional hierarchy. The components assigned to the various levels are classified based on different company-specific terminologies: in this example, machines, function groups and function units.