System and method for visualizing technical equipment of an industrial plant

A system for displaying a communication network interconnecting technical equipment of an industrial plant, the system comprising:

• a user interface arranged for receiving image handling parameters:
• a data storing unit arranged for providing data relating to the technical equipment as device data and network data, the device data describing network devices which are all connected to the communication network and belong to the industrial plant, and the network data describing all the communication connections between the network devices;
• a data processing unit arranged for (i) retrieving the provided data from the data storing unit, (ii) transforming the device data and the network data into displayable information which contains image representations of all of the network devices and of all of the communication connections, wherein the displayable information comprises at least one of displayable text and a displayable icon specifying a consistency of data which are to be transferred between at least two network devices or which are present in at least two network devices, (iii) generating a plant view of the communication network containing the image representations and illustrating geographical locations of the network devices inside the plant and physical connection lines, and (iv) generating a zoomed view of a selected part of the plant view of the communication network with search functionality by (a) providing a search engine which interacts with the data storing unit to allow for searches of text strings associated with the image representations and (b) highlighting, in response to receiving a text string to be searched, all image representations that match the text string;
• and
• a graphical display unit arranged to display the image representations and further displayable information according to the image handling parameters.