Industrial IDE Collaboration With Milestone Rollback Control
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Industrial automation systems face challenges in collaborative development environments, where multiple developers work on separate platforms, leading to piecemeal design approaches, significant testing, and debugging efforts due to disparate programming efforts, and limited support for integrated, multi-discipline programming across control, visualization, and other aspects of the control system.
Innovation Solution
An integrated development environment (IDE) for industrial automation systems that enables collaborative, cloud-based development, allowing multiple developers to work on a common design environment and data model, with features like collaboration management, project deployment, and version control to ensure consistency and coordination across different design inputs.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If multiple developers work on separate platforms with piecemeal design approaches, then each developer can work independently on their assigned tasks, but the overall system integration becomes complex and requires significant testing and debugging efforts
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple separate development platforms into a single integrated development environment where control system programming, visualization development, and other system aspects are unified. This integration allows developers to work on different components simultaneously while maintaining automatic coordination, thereby reducing system integration complexity and testing requirements.
Solution Approach 2:
The integrated development environment provides universal functionality that handles multiple development tasks across different system aspects (control, visualization, configuration) within a single platform. This multi-functional approach eliminates the need for separate tools and reduces the complexity of integrating disparate components.
2Productivity
If developers use disparate programming efforts across separate platforms, then each developer can focus on specific tasks, but the coordination and consistency across different system aspects deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The integrated development environment implements automatic feedback mechanisms that monitor changes across different system aspects in real-time. When one developer modifies control logic or visualization elements, the system automatically detects dependencies and notifies affected developers, ensuring consistency is maintained without requiring manual coordination.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary analysis of code dependencies and potential conflicts before developers commit changes. By pre-identifying integration issues and coordinating development sequences, the system maintains reliability while allowing high developer productivity through parallel work on different components.
3Ease of manufacture
If traditional separate platform development is used, then development tools can be specialized for specific tasks, but the overall development time and debugging efforts increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines previously separate development tools for control programming, visualization, and system configuration into a single integrated environment. This merging maintains the specialized capabilities of each tool while eliminating the time lost to context switching, file transfers, and manual integration between separate platforms.
Solution Approach 2:
The integrated development environment enables continuous development workflow where changes in one area automatically trigger relevant updates or notifications in other areas. This continuity eliminates interruptions and idle time that occur when switching between separate tools, significantly reducing total development time while maintaining specialized functionality.
Data Source
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. The industrial IDE also permits localized development of system projects, and provides an infrastructure for intelligently brokering between conflicting edits submitted to common portions of the system project. Project edits submitted to the IDE system, both applied and unapplied, are stored as edit records, allowing edits to be selectively undone or applied either manually or as part of a rollback to a milestone version.