Automation systems can be structured according to physical and functional aspects, supplemented by the consideration of the dependencies between the elements of both structures. This information is required for analyses of effects due to temporal changes of the physical system structures, e.g. to analyze the effect of a component fault onto the automation system functions. This contribution proposes a metamodel for the system level design of automation systems, which makes use of hierarchical structures offered by the description language AutomationML, structured on the basis of the IEC 81346 aspects: product, function, and location, and supplemented by inter and intra structure relationships for modeling the dependencies. Modeling temporal changes is considered by means of the integration of an event structure into the metamodel. © 2012 IEEE.