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Nowadays the software in Automation system faces new challenges. Firstly, automation systems are subject to ongoing partial modifications: rapid development and decreasing costs of high-capacity hardware components cause changes in the plant’s hardware structure and functionality during its life cycle, which is up to 30 years. As existing plants cannot be rebuilt due to high investment volumes, the changes in hardware components affect particularly the software: it has to be modified continuously and its amount and complexity increases. Besides that plant operating managers increasingly require the possibility to use hardware and software components of different manufacturers and technologies in their plants.
Both trends result in increasing efforts for integration and configuration of the automation system. Hardware components of different manufacturers e.g. often require individual parameterization tools, resulting in a large set of tools for the engineer to handle. Besides that, plant operating managers today want to manage and optimize the use and the maintenance of their assets during the operating of the plant.
And finally, a strong need for the integration of functionality from enterprise management and business levels into the automation system arises (vertical integration). As automation systems have been evolved isolated from other enterprise software systems, every system has its own grown architecture and data structures and the efforts for establishing interoperability of the heterogeneous systems are high. They all affect tasks and processes for the engineering of automation systems, leading to three main challenges:
- Faster development and modification of automation systems in plants, e.g. engineer support in plant design (planning), implementation and commissioning.
- Support in plant management and engineering during operation, e.g. condition monitoring, diagnosis, maintenance and asset management.
- Integration and interoperability of different heterogeneous systems, e.g. enterprise resource planning systems, or parameterization tools for field devices.
Today a lot of these engineering and integration tasks are done manually with high effort and costs. There is a strong need in the industry for extensive support of these tasks by additional engineering functionality of the automation system. However, the listed challenges result in strong requirements on flexibility and adaptability of the software during the whole life cycle. And, for the automation of engineering and integration tasks also more autonomy in the software is needed.
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