Collaborative Automation IDE for Parallel Design Consistency
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Solution Overview
Problem
Industrial automation systems face challenges in collaborative development environments, where separate configuration tools and limited support for parallel development lead to piecemeal design approaches, significant testing, and debugging efforts, and lack of integrated, multi-discipline programming capabilities.
Innovation Solution
An integrated development environment (IDE) system that provides a common design environment and data model for industrial automation systems, enabling collaborative cloud-based development with features like brokering between design inputs, notification of modifications, and support for visualization and control programming, using a user interface component, project generation component, collaboration management component, and virtual rendering component.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of manufacture
If separate configuration tools are used for different aspects of industrial automation systems, then each tool can be specialized for its specific function, but the overall system integration becomes complex and requires significant debugging efforts
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines multiple separate configuration tools into a single integrated development environment (IDE) that provides unified access to control programming, visualization development, device configuration, and other automation tasks. This merging eliminates the need for developers to switch between disparate tools and reduces integration complexity while maintaining specialized functionality through modular architecture.
Solution Approach 2:
The IDE is designed as a universal platform that performs multiple functions previously requiring separate specialized tools. It provides control programming capabilities, visualization development, device configuration, and collaborative features all within one interface, allowing a single tool to replace multiple specialized configuration tools while maintaining their individual capabilities.
2Productivity
If multiple developers work in parallel on different aspects of the same project using separate tools, then development productivity increases, but coordination difficulties and debugging efforts increase
Solution Approach 1:
The IDE implements real-time feedback mechanisms that notify developers when their changes affect other parts of the system. The collaboration component monitors modifications and sends notifications to affected developers, enabling immediate awareness of interdependencies and reducing the time needed for debugging and coordination during parallel development.
Solution Approach 2:
The collaboration component acts as an intermediary between multiple developers working in parallel. It manages the interactions and dependencies between different development aspects, coordinating changes and ensuring consistency across the project without requiring direct communication between all developers, thus reducing coordination overhead.
3Reliability
If a comprehensive integrated development environment is implemented to support multi-discipline programming, then system integration improves and debugging efforts reduce, but the device complexity and initial setup requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The IDE is segmented into distinct functional modules including control programming, visualization development, device configuration, and collaboration components. Each module handles specific aspects of automation development independently, which simplifies the overall system architecture while maintaining comprehensive functionality. This modular segmentation reduces the perceived complexity by organizing features into manageable, specialized components.
Data Source
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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. These collaborative features can include, for example, brokering between different sets of design input directed to the same portion of the system project, generating notifications to remote designers when a portion of the system project is modified, sharing of development interfaces or environments, facilitating involvement of outside technical support experts to assist with design issues, and other collaborative features.