Automation Object Inheritance Control in Industrial IDE Projects
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Solution Overview
Problem
The existing industrial automation systems require separate and piecemeal development environments for different aspects, leading to inefficiencies in integration, debugging, and testing 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
1Reliability
If separate development environments are used for different aspects of industrial automation, then specialized functionality can be maintained, but integration efficiency and development time are reduced
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines multiple separate development environments (control programming, visualization development, device configuration) into a single integrated development environment. This unified IDE allows developers to work with automation objects that span all these functions simultaneously, eliminating the need to switch between disparate tools and thereby improving integration efficiency while maintaining specialized capabilities through dedicated object types.
Solution Approach 2:
The integrated development environment implements a universal automation object model that can represent different types of industrial assets (devices, processes, systems) and support multiple development activities (control, visualization, configuration) within a single framework. This multi-functional approach allows the same environment to handle diverse automation tasks without sacrificing specialized functionality.
2Stability of the object's composition
If automation objects are modified in the library, then consistency across projects is improved, but the ability to create unique instances is restricted
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a dynamic inheritance mechanism where automation objects can switch between inherited behavior and independent behavior. When a project is created, instances can dynamically inherit from library templates to ensure consistency. However, when customization is needed, the system allows breaking inheritance to create unique instances that diverge from the template, thus adapting to specific project requirements while maintaining the option for consistency when appropriate.
Solution Approach 2:
The system segments the object lifecycle into distinct phases: template definition phase (where consistency is enforced through inheritance), instance creation phase (where inheritance can be broken for customization), and project-specific modification phase (where further customization is allowed). This segmentation allows the system to enforce consistency at appropriate stages while permitting necessary adaptations.
3Ease of manufacture
If inheritance is enforced for all automation objects, then maintenance and updates are simplified, but development flexibility and unique project requirements are limited
Solution Approach 1:
The inheritance mechanism is made dynamic rather than static. The system automatically manages inheritance relationships based on project context, allowing objects to inherit from templates during initial creation for simplified maintenance, but enabling developers to break inheritance when unique project requirements demand customization. This dynamic approach balances maintenance simplicity with development flexibility.
Solution Approach 2:
The system provides self-service inheritance management where the IDE automatically tracks which objects inherit from templates and which have broken inheritance, maintaining this information metadata. This automatic tracking reduces the manual overhead of managing inheritance relationships while preserving both consistency where needed and flexibility where required.
4Productivity
If a unified development environment is implemented, then integration issues are reduced, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an automation object model as an intermediary layer between the integrated development environment and the underlying diverse automation components. This object model serves as a universal abstraction that simplifies the complexity of integrating control, visualization, and configuration functions, allowing the IDE to manage diverse assets through a consistent interface without exposing the full system complexity to users.
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.