Industry Standards

From the resident experts please;

I would like to know what you are using as your platform or standard naming structures for Control Logix. We have recently put together a team to discuss such issues as all of our PLC programmers have gone rogue. Kidding. We have just done 'what we wanted' or 'what was necessary' for nearly 2 decades and you might imagine what that looks like now.
I am open to reviewing all offerings.

Thanks!
TLAF

Use IEC 61131-3 standard. One thing you might consider is training your programmers in sequential function charts. this allows a close understanding of how the program will be laid out before programming.

I agree...
In our company we use our own cut of S88 standards and it works like a charm.

We have created our own modules which are the so called "control modules" and "equipment modules"
A control module is typically a valve, pump, fan, etc... so the lowest level.
An equipment module is a group of control modules, for example a vessel which contains a pump, valve, agitator, etc..

The brains are done by an equipment phase (sequencer). These phase have states like "idle", "starting", "started", "holding", "aborted" etc...

By assigning a Device ID and an Owner ID it is possible to let the equipment module to be "owned" by more then one phase but of course not at the same time. Think about a tank that is doing a CIP phase (owned by CIP phase that time), and once cleaned, it can be owned by production.

This way you can program very structured...

Practically a phase can give a single command like "Heat" to the equipment module, on its turn this module will spread its commands to his control modules.

If you are using SCADA or HMI you can see with a blink to which phase which module is owned at that time.

Parameters for ID's and commands will typically be integers.
This also comes in handy for alarming purpose.

Another factor to go this way is the financial side of it.
Once the modules have been defined on the P&ID, you can allocate a junior engineer to create the lower level and easy equipment modules and control modules.
The actual sequencing can be allocated to a more expensive senior engineer.

Another nice thing is if you use ePlan for the electrical drawings, it comes with this feature, there you will see tags like =03+T01-M01 which converts to

=03 (Unit 03 which is a group of equipment modules)
+T01 (Tank 01 which is an equipment module)
-M01 (Motor 01 which is a control module)

Just my five cent...