Requirements on Evolution Management of Product Lines in Automation Engineering

The initial investment costs for a production plant are enormous – in many cases up to 100 Mio. €, and the entire life-cycle is up to 30 years. In order to preserve existing investments and to retain the competitiveness of the production plant it continuously has to be developed and improved further. In consequence, basic modules (software, electric, and/or mechanic) as well as application modules (product line based combination of basic modules) have to be upgraded during the entire life cycle of the automation system in cooperation of plant owner and module supplier. Therefore two essential topics have to be considered: a) an integrated variant- and version management of basic modules, application modules based on product lines, and modules, which are part of production plants in the field and b) an interdisciplinary compatibility supervision technique to validate the compatibility of new module versions with respect to the various application contexts and the complex dependencies between software (software design), platform (electrical design) and/or context (mechanical design). Both challenges can only be resolved with an appropriate tool support for variant and version management of modular models and for model validation to supervise the interdisciplinary compatibility. To provide this tool support a syntactic and semantic formal model is necessary. In this paper the requirements on a holistic mathematical modeling of evolution in automation engineering are proposed.