Experiences on Traceability and Consistency Checking across Engineering Tools in an Automation Solution Company

The engineering of systems is unimaginable without software tools. Engineers use them to capture and analyze engineering problems; specify, implement, test, and maintain engineering solutions, and manage engineering processes. Yet, there is a gap between the capabilities of independently working engineers and the needs of a collaborative engineering team. The existing tool landscape emphasizes the former. Most engineering tools are single-user applications – often of excellent quality but limited in that they support the works of individual engineers and not that of a group of engineers. And herein lies one of the most fundamental problems of software and systems engineering. Engineers know well the engineering knowledge they capture but they often lack awareness of the many implications their work has on other engineers and/or other engineering domains. This is a problem because in today’s engineering projects, companies continuously have to adapt their systems to changing customer or market requirements. This requires a flexible, iterative development process in which different parts of the system under construction are built and updated concurrently. However, concurrent engineering is quite problematic in domains where different engineering domains and different engineering tools come together. In this paper, we discuss experiences with Van Hoecke Automation, a leading company in the areas of production automation and product processing, in maintaining the consistency between electrical models and the corresponding software controller when both are subject to continuous change. The paper discusses how we let engineers describe the relationships between electrical model and software code in form of links and consistency rules; and how through continuous consistency checking our approach then notified those engineers of the erroneous impact of changes in either electrical model or code.