Hi. I have exactly the same conflict.
I come from a chemical and process background where all PLC and SCADA tags would be the P&ID names. For example, a temperature transmitter tag could be:
A16TT001
A16: Area in the plant/PLC identifier
TT: Temperature transmitter
001: Device number (matching the P&ID)
Tags were stored in a folder structure depending on the location in the plant. The plants used a single PLC vendor and all tags were UDTs containing information including PV, setpoint, raw integer, high limit etc.
I have now moved into a manufacturing role. Our plant is made up of many discrete manufacturing cells and machines. We have PLCs from many different vendors and P&IDs are only used for a few machines. It is difficult to implement UDTs effectively as some machines will only output a "process" variable without any "metadata". Here, the approach described above doesn't work and (I think) the verbose approach is better. An example of my current convention is:
Line1\Foundry\Machine1\FurnaceTemp
My new ignition SCADA system is currently in its infancy so I can easily make changes to the tag naming convention at this point. I would be very interested to read about the tag naming conventions used by others in manufacturing. Is there anyone willing to share details of their system?
Cheers.