Reusable Models in Industrial Automation: Experiences in Defining Appropriate Levels of Granularity

Abstract

AbstractDomain engineering approaches are widely used in the software engineering. They focus on building reusable models in a domain. At the Institute of Industrial Automation and Software Engineering (IAS) of the University of Stuttgart, a new domain engineering approach has been developed. The approach considers entire industrial automation systems, including hardware and software. Models that capture structure and behavior of entire systems have to be carefully tailored, in order to be reusable. The level of granularity deserves particular attention, since too coarse or too fine grained reusable models discourage reuse. This paper addresses the issue of finding appropriate levels of granularity and proposes a set of recommendations for determining appropriate levels of granularity for reusable models created during domain engineering.