Forever Young Production Automation with Active Components (FYPA²C)

The FYPA²C project aimed at supporting the user of a production system during the evolution of this production system. The main problem targeted by FYPA²C’s evolution support is the lack of documentation of production automation software in industrial practice. Often, there is no formalized specification of the software, or an initial specification is not adapted when changes in the process have been implemented. Hence no documentation about the system’s behavior is available and a verification of the (changed) process is hard to perform. This is a common problem also for other domains of software systems in which documentation is often poorly written or frequently out of date.

Therefore, in the FYPA²C project, methods have been developed for documenting production systems by gathering knowledge about the behavior of the processes and their properties during runtime. This knowledge is used to evaluate the behavior after an evolution step against the pre-evolutionary observed behavior. More specifically, methods and processes have been developed to support the operator by implementing an external Knowledge Carrying Software (KCS) that is connected to the (production) system and monitors the (undocumented) system behavior in order to determine system properties related to non-functional requirements. The observed properties, represented in the KCS in runtime artefacts, are used to point out consequences and potential unintended side effects of evolutionary changes.

Keywords

Anti-Aging for Evolving Long-Living Software, Production Automation, Active Components, Non-Functional Requirements, Self-Monitoring

Further Information

To go in more detail with the FYPA²C project visit our subsites about the apporachdemonstrations, members or publications.