Automation Object Inheritance for Unified Industrial IDE Projects
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Solution Overview
Problem
Industrial automation systems require separate configuration tools for different aspects, leading to a piecemeal design approach that complicates integration and debugging due to disparate programming efforts.
Innovation Solution
An integrated development environment (IDE) that uses automation objects as building blocks, supporting object-based development and inheritance to propagate changes across projects, facilitating unified programming and configuration of industrial automation systems.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If separate configuration tools are used for different aspects of industrial automation systems, then specialized functionality is achieved, but integration complexity and debugging difficulty increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines multiple separate configuration tools into a single integrated development environment that provides unified object-based programming capabilities. This allows users to configure different aspects of automation systems (logic, HMI, networking) through a common interface and data model, eliminating the need to switch between disparate tools and reducing integration complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The integrated development environment implements a universal object model that can represent various automation system components (controllers, devices, processes) in a unified manner. This universal approach allows the same programming paradigm and tools to be used across different configuration tasks, providing specialized functionality through a single versatile platform.
2Adaptability or versatility
If separate configuration tools are used for different aspects, then specialized configuration capabilities are maintained, but debugging becomes more difficult
Solution Approach 1:
By merging debugging capabilities into the integrated development environment, the system provides unified debugging tools that can trace interactions across all configuration aspects (logic, HMI, networking) within a single framework. This eliminates the need to debug across multiple separate tools and their different interfaces.
Solution Approach 2:
The object model serves as an intermediary layer that standardizes data representation and interaction patterns across different configuration aspects. This intermediary structure makes it easier to detect and measure issues because all components communicate through consistent interfaces defined by the object model.
3Productivity
If object-based development with inheritance is implemented, then development efficiency is enhanced through change propagation, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system establishes object hierarchies and inheritance relationships in advance during the design phase. This preliminary structuring allows automatic change propagation when objects are modified, eliminating the need for manual updates across multiple components and significantly improving development efficiency.
Solution Approach 2:
The inheritance mechanism creates copy relationships between parent and child objects, where changes to parent objects are automatically propagated to child objects. This copying approach reduces redundant work while the integrated environment manages the complexity of maintaining these relationships through automated bookkeeping.
Data Source
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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.