Linking and versioning support for AutomationML: A model-driven engineering perspective

In concurrent engineering process for industrial production plants, the domain experts need to keep an overview on the different engineering artifacts which are changed in parallel to coordinate their work. Unfortunately, current solutions often lack support for providing a versioned overview on data elements of local engineering results coming from different tools by linking them to the overall plant structure. Recently, the AutomationML (AML) standard for tool data exchange has provided a foundation for harmonizing engineering data exchange coming from a heterogeneous tool network by means of a unified format which may be also exploited in concurrent engineering processes. In this paper, we introduce a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach for developing and providing versioning and linking support for AML. The MDE process builds on an AML metamodel to derive tool support (i) for representing sets of local engineering results as data elements in AML files, (ii) for extracting AML data elements for versioning the local engineering results, and (iii) for linking the versioned local engineering results to an AML tree representing the overall plant structure. We evaluate the feasibility of the approach with a showcase based on a real-world case study. The results show that the MDE approach worked efficiently to derive tool support for versioning and linking AML structures.