LieberLieber’s engagement in Industry 4.0 and cooperation with a Christian Doppler laboratory has resulted in an award for Best Paper at the 20th International IEEE Conference in Luxemburg.
Vienna, October 6, 2015 – The 20th International IEEE Conference on “Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation” in Luxemburg this September saw the study entitled “Model-Based Co-Evolution of Production Systems and their Libraries with Automation ML” awarded with the James C. Hung Best Paper Award in Factory Automation.
The study was submitted by a team of authors from the Vienna Technical University and the Christian Doppler Laboratory. The industry partner throughout the project was LieberLieber. Peter Lieber, founder and owner of LieberLieber, expressed his praise: “We are very pleased that the cooperation with the Christian Doppler Laboratory in the area of Industry 4.0 was so quick to yield fruit. This scientific paper highlights our successful path toward creating a better connection between model-based development and automation. This award strengthens our rather ambitious role as technology pioneer!”
Connecting model-based development and Industrie 4.0
At the core of development at LieberLieber and the “Software Engineering Integration for Flexible Automation Systems” (CDL-Flex) Christian Doppler Laboratory, also located in Vienna, is the connection between automation and modeling. The joint project “SysML4Industry” (www.sysml4industry.org) is all about promoting conception and development of concepts for data integration between model-based systems development and systems development in the area of automation through implementation and use of the Object Management Group’s Qvery/View/Transformation (QVT) standard.
The scientific paper deals with the joint development of production systems and the modeling language AutomationML (AML), a data format for the exchange of information across a variety of engineering disciplines. The integration of this format into the modeling platform Enterprise Architect is carried out by the AML Toolkit for Enterprise Architect. This allows easy modeling and the seamless linking of information exchanged with AML engineering data with modeling techniques from other disciplines such as software engineering. Univ.Ass. Priv.Doz. Dr. Manuel Wimmer, director of this Christian Doppler Labor project: „When modeling automation systems Depending on the engineering domain different tools are used. When modeling automation systems, different tools are used depending on the engineering domain. Each of these tools has specific file formats, which makes the exchange of data more difficult. By integrating AML into Enterprise Architect, data from multiple domain-specific tools can now be imported and processed in, and exported from, Enterprise Architect. This allows cross-domain modeling techniques to be interconnected, such as UML or SysML models with the system modeling data exchanged via AML.”
Extension simplifies the handling of Industry 4.0
The AutomationML Plugin for Enterprise Architect is an easy-to-install extension. It allows the import and export of UML models. The engineering data can be exchanged, without loss of information, using any tools that support AML. By way of a graphical editor, the models can be intuitively edited and validated for their compliance with AML. Integration into Enterprise Architect makes it possible to link the AML models with other models. Thus, the often-demanded traceability (traceability), for example, is ensured across methodological boundaries.
This graphic shows an industrial production line. The elements of this system (Internal Elements in AutomationML) were modeled in the lower portion of the image in Enterprise Architect and presented as an AML diagram. Through the logical linking of the elements, it is explicitly specified which material flows are possible within this production line.
Source: Christian Doppler Laboratory CDL-Flex