Control Program Playback With Dependency Mapping for Faster Development
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Solution Overview
Problem
Industrial automation systems are complex and disparate, leading to long development cycles for control system designs and difficulties in documenting data connections between industrial devices, due to intricate data interactions.
Innovation Solution
A cloud-based Industrial Development Hub (IDH) with a user interface, project telemetry, and analysis components that facilitate monitoring and control of industrial automation systems by generating project telemetry data and relational dependency maps to visualize dependencies between entities.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If control systems are developed through traditional manual methods, then development completeness can be maintained, but development cycles become excessively long
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary analysis of control projects by automatically examining control code, device configurations, and data connections before deployment. This advance analysis generates dependency maps and identifies potential issues early in the development process, eliminating the need for lengthy manual testing and documentation phases later, thus significantly reducing development cycle time while maintaining development completeness
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates digital representations (dependency maps and telemetry data) that replicate the complex relationships between control entities. These digital models serve as virtual copies of the actual control system connections, allowing developers to analyze, test, and document system behavior without physically deploying and manually tracing each data connection, thereby accelerating development while ensuring thoroughness
2Loss of information
If detailed documentation of data connections is created manually, then documentation accuracy can be achieved, but the complexity of documenting data interactions becomes unmanageable
Solution Approach 1:
The system automatically generates comprehensive documentation of data connections by having the control entities themselves provide their configuration data and relationship information through telemetry. The system extracts dependency information directly from the control code and device configurations without requiring manual tracing or documentation efforts, thereby achieving complete and accurate documentation while eliminating the complexity burden from developers
Solution Approach 2:
The system replaces the manual mechanical process of documenting data connections with an automated computational approach. Instead of developers manually tracing and recording data flows through the control system, the system uses software analysis to automatically extract, map, and document all data connections and dependencies, transforming a complex manual task into a simple automated operation that delivers complete and accurate documentation
Data Source
AI summary
A cloud-based Industrial Development Hub (IDH) supports development and testing capabilities for industrial customers that are easy to use and offered as a service. The IDH comprises an enhanced storage platform and associated design tools—collectively referred to as the Vault—which serves as a repository on which customers can store control project code, device configurations, and other digital aspects of an industrial automation project. The IDH system can facilitate discovery and management of digital content associated with control systems, and can be used for system backup and restore, code conversion, and version management. In addition, the IDH includes analytic tools that can analyze industrial control projects submitted by user and generate project telemetry data based on the analysis. The system can translate this project telemetry data to various types of relational maps that visualized dependencies between data producers and consumers from a control standpoint.