Industrial IDE Collaboration Brokering for Consistent Control Code
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Solution Overview
Problem
Industrial automation systems face challenges in collaborative development environments, where multiple developers struggle to work on a single automation system project in parallel due to limitations in existing development platforms, leading to inconsistent designs and increased debugging efforts.
Innovation Solution
A cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) that facilitates collaborative development by managing design inputs from multiple developers, performing version control, and ensuring project consistency through a collaboration management component, which determines and applies edits to a master version of the system project data while resolving conflicts.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If multiple developers work on a single automation system project in parallel using existing development platforms, then development productivity increases, but design consistency deteriorates and debugging complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a cloud-based collaboration management component as an intermediary between multiple developers and the master project data. This mediator receives edit records from multiple developers, determines conflicts between edits, and applies non-conflicting edits to the master project data, thereby maintaining design consistency while enabling parallel development.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback mechanisms where the collaboration management component continuously monitors edit records from multiple developers, determines conflicts in real-time, and provides feedback to developers about the status of their edits. This feedback loop ensures design consistency is maintained while allowing parallel development activities.
2Speed
If multiple developers work on a single automation system project in parallel, then development speed increases, but debugging efforts increase
Solution Approach 1:
The collaboration management component acts as a mediator that prevents conflicting edits from being applied to the master project data. By filtering out conflicts before they reach the master data, the system eliminates the need for extensive debugging that would otherwise be required to resolve inconsistencies introduced by parallel development.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary conflict detection and resolution before edits are applied to the master project data. The collaboration management component determines conflicts between edit records in advance, preventing problematic edits from being integrated, thereby avoiding future debugging efforts.
3Ease of operation
If existing development platforms are used for collaborative development, then ease of operation is maintained, but project consistency deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The cloud-based collaboration management component serves as an intermediary layer between developers using familiar IDEs and the master project data. This intermediary maintains project consistency by determining conflicts and selectively applying edits, while developers continue to operate using their existing development tools and workflows.
Data Source
AI summary
An industrial integrated development environment (IDE) supports collaborative tools that allow multiple designers and programmers to remotely submit design input to the same automation system project in parallel while maintaining project consistency. The industrial IDE also permits localized development of system projects, and provides an infrastructure for intelligently brokering between conflicting edits submitted to common portions of the system project.