Concept for interoperability between independent engineering tools of heterogeneous disciplines

Author

Drath, Rainer ; Barth, Mike

Author_Institution

ABB Corp. Res. Center-Germany, Ladenburg, Germany

fYear

2011

fDate

5-9 Sept. 2011

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

8

Abstract

Interoperability of engineering tools describes their ability to collaborate with each other across their tool borders, company locations and workflow phases. Therefore it is considered as an important indicator for engineering efficiency - but it is rarely supported by today´s heterogeneous industrial software. This paper motivates the need of interoperability, describes the state of the art and its issues, derives requirements and presents a new concept to overcome the mentioned issues. This approach introduces the concepts of Collaboration Objects, Data Ownership and Data Exchange Feedback Loops and utilizes a file based data exchange by means of AutomationML. Finally, the paper describes the developed workflow concept together with required software functionality for a collaboration middleware.

Keywords

electronic data interchange; middleware; open systems; workflow management software; AutomationML; collaboration middleware; collaboration objects; data exchange feedback loops; data ownership; engineering efficiency; heterogeneous disciplines; heterogeneous industrial software; independent engineering tools; industrial automation systems; interoperability; software functionality; workflow concept; Collaboration; Data models; Databases; Object oriented modeling; Receivers; Robots; Software; AutomationML; Collaboration Objects; Data Ownership; Interoperability;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation (ETFA), 2011 IEEE 16th Conference on

Conference_Location

Toulouse

ISSN

1946-0740

Print_ISBN

978-1-4577-0017-0

Electronic_ISBN

1946-0740

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ETFA.2011.6058975

Filename

6058975