Challenges for maintenance of PLC-software and its related hardware for automated production systems: Selected industrial Case Studies

Vogel‐Heuser, Birgit; Fischer, Juliane; Rösch, Susanne; Feldmann, Stefan; Ulewicz, Sebastian

doi:10.1109/icsm.2015.7332487

Cited by 33 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Vogel-Heuser et al [16] confirmed the five architectural levels proposed by ISA 88 [17] by analyzing the SW architecture of companies from the MM and PM industry. Further, [18] confirms that the reuse potential of application-specific POUs correlates with the architectural hierarchy levels they are located on: the higher the level of a POU, the lower is its potential for reuse.…”

Section: Rq4 What Are the Causes And Consequences Of Control Sw Compmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…Further, the authors in [4] divide the lifecycle of aPS into two main phases: At first, engineering, which includes testing/quality assurance, and second, after acceptance test, operation and maintenance. Due to the nature of aPS, changes resulting from new products, unforeseen raw material, or environmental conditions often have to be made on-site [4], [16].…”

Section: Characteristics Of Aps Suppliersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Success Factors for the Design of Field-level Control Code in Machine and Plant Manufacturing - an Industrial Survey -

Vogel‐Heuser

Fischer

Neumann

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The amount of software in automated production systems, including its development effort, is continuously increasing to currently up to 35-50% of the development personnel. Consequently, success factors for achieving modularity and complexity management of control software are of high economic interest. Scientific solutions are manifold but often not implemented in industry. This paper introduces the study QoaPS SWE (Quality of automated Production Systems’ Software Engineering) providing insights into 61 machine and plant manufacturing companies to give quantitative and qualitative results to five essential research questions on success factors in the design of field-level control code. Compared to preceding surveys, QoaPS SWE achieves statistically significant results for software maturity (MMOD+), complexity, and model-based software engineering and provides detailed insights into causes and consequences for single criteria, thus clearly identifying obstacles to be addressed in future research and with industrial countermeasures. Especially staff qualification and organizational issues are identified as obstacles to applying the object-oriented programming paradigm for control software in machine and plant manufacturing. Validity is ensured by analyzing the statistical significance of the results in addition to comparisons with earlier surveys and interviews as well as the comparison with already existing and accepted maturity levels. The provided qualitative and quantitative results will allow the benchmarking of companies’ maturity and the derivation of concrete recommendations for companies depending on their MMOD+ value and the evaluated characteristics.

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Section: Rq4 What Are the Causes And Consequences Of Control Sw Compmentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: Characteristics Of Aps Suppliersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Success Factors for the Design of Field-level Control Code in Machine and Plant Manufacturing - an Industrial Survey -

Vogel‐Heuser

Fischer

Neumann

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The approach's feasibility is shown by analyzing (1) a typical function block from an industrial context and (2) an application scenario which combines this block with a second one. According to Vogel-Heuser et al [6], software faults are mainly caused on these levels of system design: the atomic and the basic level.…”

Section: Application Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Vogel-Heuser et al has shown in [6] that faults mostly occur on lower software architecture levels. Subsequently, errors must often be handled on the atomic or basic module layer.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generalized test tables: A powerful and intuitive specification language for reactive systems

Weigl

Wiebe

Ulbrich

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE 15th International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN)

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With recent trends in manufacturing automation, such as Industry 4.0, control software in automated production systems becomes more and more complex and volatile, complicating and increasing importance of quality assurance. Test tables are a widely used and generally accepted means to intuitively specify test cases for automation software. However, each table only specifies a single software trace, whereas the actual software behavior may cover multiple similar traces not covered by the table. Within this work, we present a generalization concept for test tables allowing for bounded and unbounded repetition of steps, "don't-care" values, as well as calculations with earlier observed values. We provide a verification mechanism for checking conformance of an IEC 61131-3 PLC software with a generalized test table, making use of a state-of-the-art model checker. Our notation is inspired by widely-used paradigms found in spreadsheet applications. By an empirical study with mechanical engineering students, we show that the notation matches user expectations. A real-world example extracted from an industrial automation plant illustrates our approach.

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“…The architectural levels can be used recursively, i.e., each level can consist of all module types of the more fine-grained levels." [8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fault Handling in PLC-Based Industry 4.0 Automated Production Systems as a Basis for Restart and Self-Configuration and Its Evaluation

Vogel‐Heuser¹,

Rösch²,

Fischer³

et al. 2016

JSEA

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Industry 4.0 and Cyber Physical Production Systems (CPPS) are often discussed and partially already sold. One important feature of CPPS is fault tolerance and as a consequence self-configuration and restart to increase Overall Equipment Effectiveness. To understand this challenge at first the state of the art of fault handling in industrial automated production systems (aPS) is discussed as a result of a case study analysis in eight companies developing aPS. In the next step, metrics to evaluate the concept of self-configuration and restart for aPS focusing on real-time capabilities, fault coverage and effort to increase fault coverage are proposed. Finally, two different lab size case studies prove the applicability of the concepts of self-configuration, restart and the proposed metrics.

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Challenges for maintenance of PLC-software and its related hardware for automated production systems: Selected industrial Case Studies

Cited by 33 publications

References 15 publications

Success Factors for the Design of Field-level Control Code in Machine and Plant Manufacturing - an Industrial Survey -

Success Factors for the Design of Field-level Control Code in Machine and Plant Manufacturing - an Industrial Survey -

Generalized test tables: A powerful and intuitive specification language for reactive systems

Fault Handling in PLC-Based Industry 4.0 Automated Production Systems as a Basis for Restart and Self-Configuration and Its Evaluation

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