Applicability of Technical Debt as a Concept to Understand Obstacles for Evolution of Automated Production Systems

Automated production systems (aPS), a specific class of mechatronic systems, are complex, long living, software intensive, evolving systems designed according to customer request. Often, the evolution of such systems has to cope with imponderables and sudden disturbances of the systematic development or maintenance process. In software engineering, the concept of technical debt and, in more detail, architectural technical debt has been introduced recently to describe phenomena, which increase software development costs over time. This paper tries to adapt and apply the classification of technical debt and architectural technical debt to automated production systems, identifying similar dimensions but adding specific challenges, causes and their effects. Once the causes and effects are identified, management and recovery strategies coping with technical debt and architectural technical debt shall be developed in the future, thereby enlarging the strategies from software engineering. The adapted classification and adaptations are based on the experience of several industrial projects in aPS.