Pumps are important industrial plant components in e.g. process industry, manufacturing industry and building engineering services. Due to a large installed basis, they allocate considerable capital and resources in numerous plants. An elementary task of pumps in operational process control engineering is to fulfill their basic function of conveying liquids or evacuating gases. Apart from the basic function, additional functionalities, e.g. self-monitoring, the generation of condition information and innovative diagnostics, open up a large potential for the optimization of the maintenance. To avoid breakdowns and to minimize downtimes of a production plant, self-monitoring and diagnostic functionalities are requested by plant operators. Information about the identification of pumps is essential for the audit trail and device management, the energy consumption is important for energy management applications etc. High-functional pumps are multivariable devices since they need information about the process. Such pumps are also a window to the process, an important source for additional information about the current process state .
Therefore, the integration of the informational bookkeeping of pumps into process control engineering is not only important for operational process control. Particularly its integration into a comprehensive plant asset management (e.g. foresighted maintenance) and plant energy management activates the full potential of pumps .