CAEX (Computer Aided Engineering Exchange) is a neutral data format that allows storage of hierarchical object information, e.g. the hierarchical architecture of a plant. On a certain abstraction level, a plant consists of modules or components that are interconnected. CAEX allows storage of those modules or components by means of objects. Object oriented concepts such as encapsulation, classes, class libraries, instances, instance hierarchies, inheritance, relations, attributes and interfaces are explicitly supported. CAEX bases on XML and is defined as an XML schema (xsd file). The original intention of developing CAEX was to remedy industry's lack of a common and established data exchange between process engineering tools and process control engineering tools. However, CAEX can be appli