Abstract
Many industrial companies and researchers are looking for more efficient model driven engineering approaches (MDE) in software engineering of manufacturing automation systems (MS) especially for logic control programming, but are uncertain about the applicability and effort needed to implement those approaches in comparison to classical Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) programming with IEC 61131-3. The paper summarizes results of usability experiments evaluating UML and SysML as software engineering notations for a MDE applied in the domain of manufacturing systems. Modeling MS needs to cover the domain specific characteristics, i.e. hybrid process, real time requirements and communication requirements. In addition the paper presents factors, constraint and practical experience for the development of further usability experiments. The paper gives examples of notational expressiveness and weaknesses of UML and SysML. The appendix delivers detailed master models, representing the correct best suited model, and evaluation schemes of the experiment, which is helpful if setting up own empirical experiments.
Highlights
Today, manufacturing automation systems (MS) mostly consist of Programmable Logic Controller (PLC)-based control systems [1] programmedHow to cite this paper: Vogel-Heuser, B. (2014) Usability Experiments to Evaluate UML/SysML-Based Model Driven Software Engineering Notations for Logic Control in Manufacturing Automation
Because of the observed thinking breaks, we analyzed the modeling progress over time in a random sample of only three subjects we found differences in plcUML and IEC group, in the plcUML group there is a longer period of time until points referring to the master model are gathered and there is a clear ramp in points compared to the more steady increase of points in FBS group (Figure 7)
1) Automation Task To classify or rank the automation task complexity compared to other experiments and to estimate the time needed for training as well as the task itself in the experiment, the authors introduced some measures, i.e. number of inputs and outputs (I/O), number and type of control loops and depending on the used notation the weighted methods per class (WMC) and number of states for OO design and the number of FBDs and variables for classical PLC programming using IEC 61131-3
Summary
Today, manufacturing automation systems (MS) mostly consist of PLC-based control systems [1] programmedHow to cite this paper: Vogel-Heuser, B. (2014) Usability Experiments to Evaluate UML/SysML-Based Model Driven Software Engineering Notations for Logic Control in Manufacturing Automation. (2014) Usability Experiments to Evaluate UML/SysML-Based Model Driven Software Engineering Notations for Logic Control in Manufacturing Automation. One key challenge of manufacturing automation companies in high wage countries is to increase efficiency, effectiveness and quality in design of software engineering for MS to shorten engineering and start-up time and ease maintenance. To reach this goal, model driven software engineering (MDE) including code generation is a promising systematic approach [1]. A variety of different modeling notations (general and domain specific ones) were developed and defined by academia and/or tool suppliers during the last decades to improve efficiency and effectiveness and to increase software quality in manufacturing automation, e.g. Vyatkin [7]-[9], Fantuzzi, et al [10]-[12], Thramboulidis, et al [3] [13] [14], VogelHeuser, et al [15] [16] or Estévez, et al [17] [18]
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