The role class “Area” should be used for production buildings and their subdivisions (structure/hall), used for hierarchical organization. The definition of an “Area” is given in IEC 62264-1:2013, 5.3.4: “An area is a physical, geographical, or logical grouping determined by the site. It may contain process cells, production units, and production lines. The main production capability and geographical location within a site usually identify areas. Examples of area identifications are ‘North End Tank Farm’ and ‘Building 2 Electronic Assembly’. Areas generally have well-defined manufacturing capabilities and capacities. The capabilities and capacities are used for planning and scheduling. An area is made up of lower-level elements that perform the manufacturing functions. There are three types of elements defined that correspond to continuous manufacturing models, discrete (repetitive and nonrepetitive) manufacturing models, and batch manufacturing models. An area may have one or more of any of the lower-level elements depending upon the manufacturing requirements. Many areas will have a combination of production lines for the discrete operations, production units for the continuous processes, and process cells for batch processes. For example, a beverage manufacturer may have an area with continuous mixing in a production unit, which feeds a batch process cell for batch processing, feeding a bottling line for a discrete bottling process.”

The Area is formally defined in Table 93.

Table 93 - Area Definition

Attribute	Value
BrowseName	Area
IsAbstract	False
References	NodeClass	BrowseName	DataType	TypeDefinition	ModellingRule
Inherit the components of the ResourceStructure
HasProperty	Variable	ID	BaseDataType	PropertyType	Optional
HasProperty	Variable	Version	BaseDataType	PropertyType	Optional