Industrial IDE Model Merge for Consistent Collaborative Projects
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing industrial development platforms face challenges in efficiently merging different versions of industrial system projects, leading to issues such as loss of work, undesired changes, and manual intervention due to conflicts in collaborative editing scenarios.
Innovation Solution
An industrial integrated development environment (IDE) system that performs comparison and merge operations on abstract model descriptions using dedicated type comparison and combining algorithms, automatically resolving conflicts and ensuring consistency without manual intervention.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If multiple developers work on different versions of an industrial system project simultaneously, then collaborative development efficiency is improved, but conflicts arise leading to loss of work and undesired changes
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the industrial system project into a hierarchical model structure with distinct node types (technology nodes, asset nodes, variable nodes, etc.). Each node can be independently edited by different developers without causing conflicts in other parts of the system. The merge component compares and merges individual nodes rather than entire project files, enabling parallel development while maintaining version consistency.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a merge component as an intermediary system that automatically reconciles differences between multiple edited versions of the industrial system project. This mediator compares node-level changes from different developers, resolves conflicts according to predefined rules, and generates a merged version without requiring manual intervention, thus preventing loss of work and undesired changes.
2Ease of operation
If automated merging is implemented to resolve conflicts, then manual intervention is reduced, but complexity of the merging system increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent changes the parameter of conflict resolution from manual text-based editing to automated algorithm-based merging. The merge component uses predefined merging rules and node comparison algorithms to automatically resolve conflicts, eliminating the need for manual intervention while managing system complexity through structured model descriptions and standardized node types.
Solution Approach 2:
The merging system performs self-service by automatically comparing, analyzing, and merging nodes from different project versions without requiring external manual intervention. The system uses its own built-in merging rules and algorithms to resolve conflicts autonomously, reducing operational complexity despite the sophisticated underlying merge logic.
3Manufacturing precision
If model-level comparison is used instead of text-based comparison, then merging precision is improved, but processing time increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the project comparison task into individual node-level comparisons rather than comparing entire text files. By dividing the model into discrete nodes with defined types and properties, the system can efficiently compare only relevant elements, improving merging precision while reducing overall processing time through targeted rather than exhaustive comparison.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the comparison parameter from unstructured text matching to structured model node comparison. By representing the industrial system project as a hierarchical model with typed nodes and properties, the merge component can perform precise semantic comparison and merging operations that are both more accurate and more efficient than text-based approaches.
Data Source
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AI summary
An industrial integrated development environment (IDE) supports collaborative development of industrial projects, such as human-machine interface applications. industrial controller programs, device configurations, or other such projects. Rather than merging edits by comparing text representations of the edited projects on a line-by-line basis, the system expresses the edited and base versions of the system project as unified information models that represent the project versions as hierarchical organizations of nodes representing elements of the project, and compares corresponding nodes of the information models to obtain differential statuses for the nodes. The various versions of the nodes are then merged into a single consistent model based on the differential statuses of the nodes.