Automation Object Inheritance for Consistent Industrial IDE Updates
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Solution Overview
Problem
Industrial automation systems require separate and piecemeal development environments for different aspects, leading to inefficiencies in integration, testing, and debugging due to disparate programming efforts.
Innovation Solution
An integrated development environment (IDE) system that uses automation objects as building blocks, supporting object-based development and inheritance to ensure consistency and propagate changes across projects, facilitating unified design, programming, and configuration of industrial automation systems.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If separate development environments are used for different aspects of industrial automation, then specialized functionality is maintained, but integration efficiency and development time are reduced
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines control programming, visualization development, and device configuration into a single integrated development environment. The IDE provides unified project management, allowing developers to work with automation objects that represent industrial assets across multiple development aspects simultaneously, eliminating the need for separate development tools and improving integration efficiency.
Solution Approach 2:
The IDE is designed as a universal platform that handles multiple development tasks within a single environment. It supports creating and managing automation objects, control programs, visualization applications, and device configurations all through one interface, making the system multi-functional and reducing the complexity of managing multiple separate tools.
2Stability of the object's composition
If automation objects are modified in the library, then consistency across projects is improved, but the risk of unintended changes to existing instances increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system provides feedback mechanisms that monitor and track modifications to automation objects. When an object in the library is modified, the system can detect which instances are affected and provide options for propagation. This feedback loop allows developers to review changes before they are applied, ensuring consistency while maintaining system stability through controlled update processes.
Solution Approach 2:
Before modifying automation objects that are instantiated in projects, the system performs preliminary checks to determine the impact of the modification. It identifies all instances that would be affected and allows developers to review and approve the propagation of changes, preventing unintended modifications and ensuring reliable update processes.
3Loss of time
If inheritance is used to propagate changes across automation objects, then development time is reduced, but the complexity of managing object relationships increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the automation system into hierarchical levels: automation object templates in the library and their instances in projects. This segmentation allows changes to be made at the template level and automatically propagated to instances, reducing development time while managing complexity through clear separation of concerns and well-defined inheritance relationships.
Data Source
AI summary
An industrial integrated development environment (IDE) provides a development framework for designing, programming, and configuring multiple aspects of an industrial automation system using a common design environment and data model. Projects creating using embodiments of the IDE system can be built on an object-based model rather than, or in addition to, a tag-based architecture. To this end, the IDE system can support the use of automation objects that serve as building blocks for this object-based development structure. To ensure consistency within and between projects, as well as to ensure that a given industrial project is dynamically updated to reflect changes to an industrial asset's attributes (e.g., control code, visualization definitions, testing scripts, analytic code, etc.), embodiments of the IDE system can use automation object inheritance features to propagate changes made to an automation object definition to all instances of the automation object used throughout a control project.